In Her Words
Luivette Resto’s books are available for purchase at FlowerSong and Tia Chucha's Bookstores
Living on Islands Not Found on Maps
In these vulnerable pages, there are lessons and conversations with Audre Lorde, Tina Turner, Nikki Giovanni, and Naomi Ayala as well as my ancestors, children, the ocean, and me. All of it centering around inheritance, shame, grief, resilience, spirituality, and the multitudinous roles of women.
“Reading Luivette Resto’s Living on Islands Not Found on Maps was like sitting down with my best women friends over coffee or wine, body loose, sharing stories of love and heartbreak, memory and family, pain and loss. With absolute candor, Resto writes about the whole range of being the woman she is: daughter, mother, lover, poet, dreamer, and Wonder Woman: “Her fans don’t know about…/the bruises on her wrists/from deflecting bullets with gold bracelets,/and the calluses left on palms after lassoing lying kingpins.” These poems trade stories until strength becomes vulnerability and vulnerability becomes strength, and we are all restored enough to venture back into the world and all its challenges.”
— ire’ne lara silva, author of Blood Sugar Canto and Cuicacalli/House of Song
“Luivette Resto’s poems celebrate the brujas, raised eyebrows, promised coffee, burn scars, and the language of the moon that we encounter in our daily rituals. Like the hungry tides, this collection challenges the colonized tongue. It beautifully wields sacrifice, humor, and power. From Puerto Rico, to the Bronx, to LA, and to all the uncharted islands in the sea, this is a journey filled with uncharted depths and possibilities, which we find “embedded here / in the pores and cells.””
— Juan J. Morales, author of The Handyman’s Guide to End Times
“Poets travel with their minds, with their memory going places that only they can find. This is what is felt when reading Living on Islands Not Found on Maps by Luivette Resto. Memories of a difficult childhood to adulthood in the Bronx and beyond, these poems express Resto’s ability to explore, the ability to use her imagination to enter and exit those unmappable islands. Spirituality, sexuality, motherhood, daughterhood, trauma, and healing are her themes as she moves in and out of memory and claims her measure of fullness as poet, mother, educator, lover, believer, and citizen, who is “trapping memories in a circle of fire and music” and letting us travel with her onto those islands, or out to sea.”
— Patricia Spears Jones, author of A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems and Painkiller
“I'm mesmerized by Luivette Resto's hechizos y encantamientos--her poems are prayers from a deep and subtle marrow.”
— Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running and founding editor of Tia Chucha Press.
UNFINISHED PORTRAIT
Some of the poems in Unfinished Portrait depict the dichotomy of being true to one's culture and language, while taking advantage of the existing educational opportunities. Resto considers these poems as rebellious to the Latino status quo in the way women are perceived and treated. In addition, some of the poems question aspects of religion, specifically sexual experimentation, premarital sex, promiscuity, abortion, and the significance of life.
“The poetry of Luivette Resto is a revelation: brave, honest, angry, intimate, political, irreverent. The poems burn with a clarity born of experience, vivid and tactile as a Taíno tattoo on the shoulder. The poet insists on her unique humanity and her Puerto Rican identity in the same breath, the girl from the Bronx with a Cornell education, demolishing the ignorance of professors who condemn bilingualism or intellectuals who want to learn new Spanish commands for the housekeeper. Resto translated untranslated lives, which she recognizes as the stuff of poetry: the immigrant, the farmworker, the dancer, the unborn child. But these are more than barrio broadsides. Here we find sonnets and odes in praise of enchiladas and cuchifritos, the echoes of poetic ancestors from Pablo Neruda to Julia de Burgos. This is a memorable and timely debut. Welcome, Poet.”
— Martín Espada, author of Floaters, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, The Trouble Ball, The Republic of Poetry, and 2018 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
“Look no further. Contrary to the title of Luivette Resto’s debut collection of poetry, the portrait she paints is not only complete, but painfully accurate; the facts from Che to Z(apata), where East meets Left, brown defies white and accents refuse to be quietly swept under the academic lectern. Powerful, bold and unapologetic--this is a book that deserves our utmost attention.”
— Michele Serros, author of Chicana Falsa, Honey Blonde Chica, and How to Be a Chicana Role Model
ASCENSION
Ascension explores the delicacy and the fragility of all relationships; not just the romantic ones in nature, but the ones we have with our family, friends, community, city, politics, nature, history, and ourselves. Some poems focus on the complexity, nascency, and dissolution of these relationships while other verses are unapologetic with their celebration of the self..
“This collection is full of fierce and tender poems. I love their clarity, their unpretentiousness, their courage, the respect given to people and situations by detailed seeing and saying. I love the poems’ lyricism, in both languages, not afraid to put the beat and heat of Spanish into English or the cool ironies and savvy of the Angl-Saxon voice into Spanish. I love how the poems give voice to outrage but without singeing the world with bitterness or ideology or rhetoric. How they celebrate our culture and champion its hybrid manifestations instead of the simple and seductive either-ors.”
— Julia Alvarez, author of The Woman I Kept to Myself, Homecoming, In the Time of the Butterflies, and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent
“¡Simon! In Luivette Resto’s second poetry collection, she shows us why our true strength lies not in our ability to harden ourselves against life’s tribulations, but in the courage that keeps us open to all things beautiful. Here is an extended meditation on love, life, and Latinindad, as experienced by one of our bright young lights. ¡Aquí está una mujer maravillosa!”
— John Murillo, author of Up Jump the Boogie and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry