​These are meditative poems to be fully present for quotidian details during COVID, online and virtual life as glimpsed through a window, in stasis, and animated by the visitations of birds. These poems show our world reduced to windows and glimpses of things actual and virtual. The experience of suspended time creates an eternal presence, a timelessness and contemplation of the eternal. Within this stillness, these poems locate through perceptions of the elemental: wind, water, earth, fire, the sun/sunlight, and darkness.

. . .  Caraza bears witness to, meditates upon and offers redress for the insufficiency of isolated lamentation. Contemplating on the contrast between Words -v- Silence, Caraza asks directly: What cures us, what heals us, what gives us strength, what nourishes us? These questions direct us to the self, but also to the world. Within the captivity of life interrupted, Caraza asks, “what frees us?”

Amy Sage Webb-Baza, Ph.D
(Excerpt from Foreword, Corazón de Agua
​Emporia State University

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Advance Praise for Corazón de Agua/Heart of Water

These are poems of both rootedness and transcendence, full of heart and breath and lift.  Poems of river- and birdsong, there is a holy rustling here as “wingbeats like sheets of paper” rise and lift.

Kevin Rabas, 
Poet Laureate of Kansas (2017-2019), While Away (Spartan Press)

 
Xánath Caraza’s new English and Spanish bilingual collection Corazon de Agua / Heart of Water provides readers with her intimate sensorial observations in crisp elemental language expressed in mainly free-verse. She captures cataloging almost-haiku like topographical cycles of nature parallel to our human hearts’ emotional fields of contraction and expansion. Close readers will also discover there’s a bold face type contrapuntal poem interwoven in each poem. 
 
There are undercurrent references of what has become our modern plague’s “lockdown” appearing interwoven with strong seasonal biological and ecological cycles as in her poem The Origin of My Blood, “…furrows are formed on my skin as black tears slide down. Distance is more painful with this unexpected pandemic” doing so while cognizant of our society’s interdependence on people doing their jobs which Caraza celebrates and has concern for as in the poem Raven, “I think of those who travel on the metro every day, without masks, without distance between them, without knowing what they will become”
 
I found Caraza’s new poems reminiscent of ecological-minded poets like Diana de Prima’s early work on the natural world as well as Gary Snyder’s mindfulness love of Nature rooted in Zen practice which she suggests in lines like in her title poem, “I stir a memory to let it go. When invoked, it vanishes. I add the sighs provoked by the mares that gallop on the prairies. I imbibe the bright green, brilliant daybreak, heart of water.”

 Carlos Cumpián, 
Author of Human Cicada (Prickly Pear Publishing)

​The poems of Heart of Water validate the concretely visceral and alternately intangible impact of the last few years, the lonely individual experience and what's shared, concentrated tension between sensory deprivation and overload, appreciation of what went unnoticed before coupled with dissociation and coping with grief.

Jenny Irizary,
​Editor at Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press

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About the Author

​Xánath Caraza is the author of twenty books of poetry and two short story collections. She writes for La Bloga and Revista Literaria Monolito. In 2018 for the International Latino Book Awards she received First Place for Lágrima roja for “Best Book of Poetry in Spanish by One Author” and First Place for Sin preámbulos / Without Preamble for “Best Book of Bilingual Poetry”.  Her book of poetry Syllables of Wind / Sílabas de viento received the 2015 International Book Award for Poetry. She was Writer-in-Residence at Westchester Community College, NY, 2016-2019.  Caraza was the recipient of the 2014 Beca Nebrija para Creadores, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares in Spain.  She was named number one of the 2013 Top Ten Latino Authors by Latino Stories. Caraza has been translated into English, Italian, Romanian, and Greek; and partially translated into Nahuatl, Portuguese, Hindi, and Turkish.   

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