This collection of 20 poems is spoken in the voice of a character named Rosa Celestina Morales, a 17 year old Puerto Rican girl living in South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the early 1970s. Rosa’s hopes and dreams, frustrations and torments are expressed in a mix of street talk, self-mumbling, and phrases from familiar prayers in Spanish, imported from the Spanish Mass and the first 20 psalms. The content is drawn from the author’s own experiences during the year she lived in Rosa’s neighborhood as well as from stories she heard and people she met around the neighborhood.
Several of these poems have appeared previously in the New York Quarterly, Cimarron Review, and Woman Song III. This is the first time the set of 20 have been collected in book form.
The work is framed as a poetic memoir. A prose introduction by the author and an afterword in Rosa’s voice round out the series of poems and project what Rosa’s life might have turned to some forty years later.
Om författaren
Pamela A. Smith is the author of two forthcoming works—a reissuing of her tenth book, Mark Time: A Gospel for the Hurried, by Tate Publishing, a poetry chapbook entitled How Jonathan Green Painted My Momma in production with Finishing Line Press—and is working on a short book of reflections called Griefwork with the book of Lamentations. Her books, published by Ave Maria Press, Twenty-Third Publications, and Paulist Press, have dealt with biblical and environmental topics. She has also authored more than a hundred articles and poems published in literary, theological, and spiritual journals and occasional anthologies. Her poetry has most recently appeared in St. Anthony Messenger, A Time for Singing, Review for Religious, and Surrounded: Living with Islands, edited by Sheryl Clough (Write Wing Press 2012). Her special interest has long been dramatic monologues—poems spoken in the voices of a variety of personas.
She has spent more than forty years in teaching and administration. Currently she lives in Bluffton, South Carolina, and is secretary for education for the Catholic Diocese of Charleston. She is a member of the Sisters of Saints Cyril and Methodius, whom she has served in a variety of roles from pot washer to general superior. She has been writing poetry since the late 1960s and began doctoral studies in English at Lehigh University, where she originally conceived this work. She holds a doctorate in systematic theology, with a specialty in environmental ethics, from Duquesne University.
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