Naked Wanting

by Margo Tamez

Come, step outside your human skin for just a little while.

Margo Tamez's voice is that of the cicada and the cricket, the raven and the crane. In this volume of poetry, she shows us that the earth is an erotic current linking all beings, a vibrant network of birth, death, and rebirth. A sacred intertwining from which we as humans have become disconnected. Tamez shares the perspective of other creatures in images that remind us of Nature's...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816522480
• ISBN13: 9780816522484
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Length: 91 Pages
• Weight: 5.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.6" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Margo Tamez stuns the reader with Naked Wanting

If you're looking for spun sugar literary confection, and easy comfort, move on. But if you want to encounter poetry that disturbs you in the best possible way, keeps you up at night, demands that you respond with your heart and your mind, read both Naked Wanting and Raven Eye. Margo Tamez is a poet whose work is not easy, clearly born of experience raw and real, making the reader touch that place of pain, of personal wounding far, far, away from the romance of the Southwest and the stereotype of the "stoic noble" on the rez. Her writing forces us to look where the bodies are buried, when we want to turn a blind eye to the violence wreaked upon the individual and environment. Both Naked Wanting and Raven Eye gave me that gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach, the tight, clenched first buried in the chest. Bless her for that. And bless her, too, for somehow still weaving threads of redemption and reemergence in the face of soulbreaking sorrow, for offering real mythos and confronting false spirituality. In My Mother Returns to Calaboz, there is a visceral longing for home, for groundedness in the deepest and most literal sense. It reflects an abiding love for la tierra, but not the convenient, fantasy-laden Southwest. It is a personal, damaged homeland, smelling of chemicals, shot through with run-off that is still somehow, unquestionably sacred. Tamez writes of border dwellers unbowed, unabsorbed, defiant, and ultimately triumphant - not noble, but stubbornly flawed and human. Lisa Alvarado, poet, editor, literary critic