Be Recorder: Poems

"“Though I was born in America / I wasn’t born American / I know it’s hard to understand,” writes Carmen Giménez Smith in her most ambitious book to date, in which she presents a new “context for the twenty-first century Latina lyric I,” the fierce and undaunted voice that speaks her poems. With a powerful allegiance to the freedom of free verse, Smith tells a sort of fragmentary superhero origin story about a girl who faces the disdain of her country to become a woman, poet and mother for whom there is no distance between the personal and the political."