Living on Islands Not Found on Maps by Luivette Resto
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.
Cover Art Design By: Jasmine Preciado
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 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.
Luivette Resto, a mother, teacher, poet, and Wonder Woman fanatic, was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico but proudly raised in the Bronx. Her two books of poetry Unfinished Portrait and Ascension have been published by Tía Chucha Press. Some of her latest work can be found on the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center website, Bozalta, Spillway, and North American Review. This is her third collection of poetry and first publication with FlowerSong Press. She lives in the San Gabriel Valley with her three children aka her revolutionaries.