"Resplendent in formal range, in image-richness, in music, empathy, and wisdom, the poems of Who Speaks for Us Here offer us a landscape of dissociation, of fragmentation in selfhood and in art. To fracture, these poems demonstrate, can be a wildly creative defense of the traumatized self. "We've all cracked/in our own ways," Leslie Contreras Schwartz writes, and goes on to show us how, in a choir of voices--missing children, victims of sex trafficking, sex workers, border detainees, family members, and the always-hungering self. To experience this collection is to encounter the "wild self choired, corralled in a thought box," where "all of us together/can make a great sound," a definition of lyric poetry if there ever was one. As a fellow traveler, I am grateful for Schwartz's vision--that to name the break, to delineate the parts, is to bring forth a singular, sacred wholeness. Who Speaks for Us Here establishes an aesthetic of survival."
--DIANE SEUSS, AUTHOR OF PULITZER FINALIST, FOUR-LEGGED GIRL, AND STILL LIFE WITH TWO DEAD PEACOCKS AND A GIRL
"Leslie Contreras Schwartz's Who Speaks For Us Here is a brave interrogation of self, and the split self, in an era that asks us to carry more than one identity with us at all times. Filled with wild horses, lost continents, alternating voices, and missing women this book asks the reader: How does one calm the voices of trauma to get through the day, a year, a life? At once troubling and filled with hope, these poems are hungry storms that will rock you awake, then help you salvage wood to build a boat, and sail you to shore."
--NATALIE SCENTERS-ZAPICO, LANNAN FELLOW AND AUTHOR OF LIMA:: LIMÓN
In stunningly varied poetic forms and a rich chorus of voices, Houston Poet Laureate Leslie Contreras Schwartz's third collection, Who Speaks for Us Here, uses poetry to examine the divide between individual and public bodies as it documents narratives of those usually silenced, including people with mental illness, sex workers, women who are trafficked, and children in custody while it also unpacks the history of her family, especially the women thereof.
A Latinx poet, activist, and mother Contreras Schwartz shines in this stirring collection as she speaks directly to so many of the violent facets of our American moment.
