Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café
Smoking Lovely

Deuda Natal

Deuda Natal finds the beauty within vulnerability and the dignity amidst precariousness. As one of the most prominent voices in Puerto Rican poetry, Mara Pastor uses the poems in this new bilingual collection to highlight the way that fundamental forms of caring for life–and for language–can create a space of poetic decolonization. The poems in Deuda Natal propose new ways of understanding as they traverse a thematic landscape of women’s labor, the figure of the nomad and immigrant, and the return from economic exile to confront the catastrophic confluence of disaster and disaster capitalism.

The poems in Deuda Natal reckon with the stark environmental degradation in Puerto Rico and the larger impacts of global climate change as they navigate our changing world through a feminist lens. Pastor’s work asserts a feminist objection to our society’s obsession with production and the accumulation of wealth, offering readers an opportunity for collective vulnerability within these pages. For this remarkable work, Pastor has found unique allies in María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong, the translators of Deuda Natal. Winner of the 2020 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets, this collection showcases masterfully crafted and translated poems that are politically urgent and emotionally striking.

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • In Shishmaref, Alaska, new seawalls are constructed while residents navigate the many practical and bureaucratic obstacles to moving their entire island village to higher ground.

  • The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all “bursting with dimples and hormones”—and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them.

  • A fascinating firsthand account written by a veteran mission controller of one of America's greatest achievements.

  • From legendary playwright August Wilson comes the powerful, stunning dramatic bestseller that won him critical acclaim, including the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize.