Wings Press

These poems, dandelion seeds, take me by surprise because they arrive at once spanking new and ancient. An old soul in a new voice. Youthful and wise all at once. Irreverent and sacred. I am anxious to see where these travel. I am certain they will voyage far.

Rodríguez leans into the wind -- and takes you with her.

Here is a fresh new voice filled with wisdom and humor. "What would my mother say to me now," muses the woman who has just asked her lover to spend the summer. In the apologetic final line, she offers, "He may marry me." Another poem measures relationships in wonderful images, one that lasts "as long as a family-sized bar of Ivory soap," and another that "made it through a bottle and a half of Flex conditioner." In "Beans," the writer laments that not only do her beans taste nothing like her mother's, they also have explosive gastronomic aftereffects. To use one of the poet's own metaphors, her poems are as immediate and familiar as "water boiling on the stove for tea."

These poems, dandelion seeds, take me by surprise because they arrive at once spanking new and ancient. An old soul in a new voice. Youthful and wise all at once. Irreverent and sacred. I am anxious to see where these travel. I am certain they will voyage far. -- Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street, My Wicked Wicked Ways, and Woman Hollering Creek

Rodríguez leans into the wind -- and takes you with her. -- Carla Trujillo, editor of Living Chicana Theory and Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About

Here is a fresh new voice filled with wisdom and humor. "What would my mother say to me now," muses the woman who has just asked her lover to spend the summer. In the apologetic final line, she offers, "He may marry me." Another poem measures relationships in wonderful images, one that lasts "as long as a family-sized bar of Ivory soap," and another that "made it through a bottle and a half of Flex conditioner." In "Beans," the writer laments that not only do her beans taste nothing like her mother's, they also have explosive gastronomic aftereffects. To use one of the poet's own metaphors, her poems are as immediate and familiar as "water boiling on the stove for tea." -- Mary Clare Wickins, in REFORMA Newsletter (Summer 2000)