Poet and YA novelist (forthcoming I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter) Erika Sánchez brings a world of raw personal material to her striking debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion. Her work fearlessly explores sexuality, Mexican narco violence and the frequent tension of being of two cultures while searching for one's own identity. These poems grow from her time in Chicago, Mexico, New York City, Madrid, New Mexico and Puerto Rico, and speak in the voice of a woman looking at herself and the rough world around her. Visceral, even feral, she explores her earthy sensuality in poems like "Poem of My Humiliation": "That time I was stunned by my own pudendum. The smell.... The vulgarity of the orchid in all its hooded glory is showy but exquisite." Reflecting on a disappointing fling in Puerto Vallarta in the melancholy poem "To You on My Birthday," she observes: "You lie next to me--husk of spirit, bituminous/ and evasive... our bodies crack/ together on the faded flowered sheets,/ the sand making its way up,/ way up in me."
Beyond the quest for self-awareness, Sánchez's poems address the struggle to reconcile her blue-collar Mexican roots with the opportunities she finds in the United States and in travel and literature. Poems like "Crossing" directly address this emotional divide: "my parents crossed the border/ in the trunk of a Cadillac./ I was born in Chicago." Sensuality, self-doubt, poverty, joy and despair--the poems of Sánchez's Lessons on Expulsion frankly and memorably touch them all. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.