Cielitos: Selected Poems
by Imelda Zapata-Garcia
0-916727-09-2 Cost: $16.00
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Critical Praise for Cielitos: Selected Poems
Poetry is more than rhymes and meter, more than the harmony of the words. At its essence, poetry documents the rhythms of life and all of the measures of joy and heartbreak, serenity and excitement, the sublime and the mundane that are distributed into each life, each family, and each community. In language that is unadorned but powerful and moving, Imelda Zapata García sketches a memorable and poetic portrait of one family's journey along life's mountains and valleys.
— Cary ClackSan Antonio Express News
- Imelda Zapata Garcia's poems are "cielitos" celebrating the gifts in her life. Recalling the innocence and joy of a family under a loving roof, she pays a poignant tribute to her mother's determination to offer her children a memorable Christmas although their tree was "a leafless branch / of spiny Huisache thorns." These poems are a testament to family strength and resiliency. Zapata García celebrates not only her personal history but also her cultural roots. In "Fruit of Youth," she writes about chapopote, the esoteric barrio licorice. In "Yerbitas" she admits: "I learned /That there is healing /Beyond what I know." Cielitos is a collection of earnest poems that warm your corazón like a morning cafecito from Imelda Zapata García's loving cocina.
— Jacinto Jesús, ahthor of Pan Dulce
Reviews
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Pieces of heaven
ConexiónMay 26, 2005
Reviewed by Elda SilvaGrowing up, Imelda Zapata García often heard her mother refer to her father as "mi cielo' — my heaven. When she married, Garcia adopted the endearment. "It was to me the most beautiful thing I could call my husband," Garcia, 52, says. Among family, the couple is affectionately known as "Los Cielitos.' When it came time to choose a title for her book, Garcia could not think of a more fitting term.
They're just poems about people and events and times of my life,' she says. "Whether they were painful or not, they're bits of my heaven. That's what the book is to me.'
Cielitos, Garcia's debut collection of poetry, recently was published by Gutenberg's Folly, an imprint established by Wings Press to publish new voices. Though this is Garcia's first book, she isn't new to writing. In the 1970s, her work was published in El Caracól, a local literary journal.
A member of the Chicano movement, she also wrote, performed and designed costumes for La Banda Feroztica, a literary performance art group, and the Chicano Arts Theater.
Like the photos, articles and mementos Garcia keeps stashed in boxes and bins, the poems are meant to document her family history. She began writing the poems in the collection about five years ago. The first was a request from her mother. "My eldest brother is a great influence in all our lives. He was like a second father, and when he turned 50, she asked me to write a poem"' Garcia says. "That started something. There's 13 (siblings), and every year one of us will turn 50, so I began to write, and my mother began to collect these (poems)."' Garcia also wrote about other events and occasions.
"My children are all very involved in the community, and anything that would happen that would call for a poem, I would write a poem about — whether it was a mural blessing or the Huevos Rancheros Gala," she says, referring to a San Anto Cultural Arts' fund-raiser.
Soon, the poems began to add up. Garcia's mother urged her to collect the poems in a book. She thought she would put something together, maybe at home on a computer — "if I had one," she says with a laugh. But her daughter, poet Victoria Garcia-Zapata Klein, urged her to go a step further and publish.
"Imelda's poems document nearly 30 years of one family's experience in San Antonio, and it is fascinating to see that kind of very personal history through the eyes of a West Side poet rather than either a formal or a family historian," publisher Bryce Milligan says. "Because the poems span so many years, the individual stories and perceptions mingle with times and places and events that the reader may recall only as events on a timeline."
The poems include "Brown Bag Christmas," about a family Christmas tradition. Unable to buy gifts, García's mother would fill paper sacks with fruits, nuts and other goodies for her 13 children to discover Christmas mornings. In "The Games We Played," Garcia writes about the makeshift toys she and her siblings fashioned from clothes pins, bottle caps and jar lids.
"Everything in my life to me is important enough to write about," she says. "I think everybody should write about their life."
About This Author
Read more about Imelda Zapata-Garcia HERE.