Books by Leslie Contreras Schwartz

Schwartz's second collection of poems examines the legacy of trauma and abuse among a family of women-and the ability of women and girls to survive. At times searing in grief, in other moments patient and willing to accept, Schwartz questions the truth behind any survival, what it looks like for a girl to emerge from the bottom of any cenote, or a city's residents to move forward after a hundred-year flood. Call all thriving things illegal: / The magnolia tree, its roots, / That vast network of veins that feeds itself / And others like it in dry soil, / Pushes space through concrete sidewalks / To breathe ... Every tough, gnarled thing holding / Its own life in a fist of vitality is illegal. --from" Everything is Illegal," Nightbloom & Cenote