After Heavy Rains by Louisa Muniz

“The poems of Louisa Muniz’s debut collection After Heavy Rains are wondrous and surreal, grounded in rich, complex emotion and the wisdom that comes after great loss. Girls cursed with the mal de ojo grow wings to save themselves, women flower from their dead mother’s spine, women and mothers driven to the edge, their hearts shattered like “five and dime trinkets,” and daughters calling them back to the flowering fields, calling their memories back to the light. Louisa Muniz eloquently and elegantly weaves together the past and present to become a fluid, daughter/mother song, and when the therapist asks the speaker to talk about her childhood, the speaker tells her about her mother; “What is a mother but an ocean / holding two beating hearts // one breaking— / in waves.” Exploring the individual and communal pain of women in a society that often still seeks to silence women, Louisa Muniz sings out, as cicada song, these refusal songs, these healing songs. What a tender and moving collection. I am broken and repaired by these beautiful poems.”

–Jenn Givhan, author of Rosa’s Einstein and Trinity Sight