In these opening verses of
Lineage of Rain (
Haymarket Books, £7.99), Salvadoran poet and educator Janel Pineda begins her mesmerising story, one of Salvadoran migration, diaspora and the US-sponsored civil war that fuses the personal with the communal and the political with everyday life.
Each poem in this powerful pamphlet sings its own beautiful tune, taking the reader on a journey of discoveries and redemption, from El Salvador to Los Angeles and back. There are moving family narratives where women take centre stage, as in Rain, where the grandmother Tana passes down stories and memories to her granddaughter.
These female voices are weavers of stories, fighters against patriarchal authority and revolutionary in their own actions. Always survivors, they retell histories that look to the past, present and future.
A PERFECT Cemetery (Charco Press, £9.99) is Argentinean writer Federico Falco s fourth collection of short stories, and it’s one of his most accomplished.Unlike many of the better-known short-story writers from Argentina, Falco was not born in Buenos Aires but in Cordoba, a province in the centre of the country surrounded by mountains, sierras and lakes, and it this supposedly idyilic landscape that shapes each of the stories in the collection.
They flow with a slow and hypnotic rhythm, with the brilliant clarity now associated with Falco’s refined style.
Particularly striking are The Hares, in which a mysterious hunter spends his days hidden in the mountains, his cave or in front of the altar that he built with the bones of the eponymous animals; and Silvi and Her Dark Night, in which the bored protagonist abandons her Catholic faith in order to get closer to a handsome Mormon, rebelling against her oppressive mother and the social conventions of her sleepy town as she does s