xuai: mission, house, village, town
by Lisa Kay Adam
Adam has done a miraculous thing: taken the whispered and fragmented words of the ancient Coahuiltecan peoples of south Texas and northern Mexico and expanded their meanings into poems that make our hearts beat fast as we connect with these ancients. With impeccable research, she transports us to the age of conquest in the Southwest by the Spanish crown, a time when the nomadic indigenous peoples were drawn into the great missions scattered along the Rio Grande and northward. The poet's interpretations of the puzzling ideologies, clashes, crucial misunderstandings, and clear cultural distinctions between civilizations brought about by the discovery of the New World opens the curtain on our under-standing of this seminal time. In our present age of reinterpreting what it means to be world citizens, we find in this beautiful book that the struggle to be accepted and yet to hold on to what is dear is an old instructive story, ever challenging us to re-think who we are and what we will accept in the pluralism of our societies.
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About the Author
Lisa Kay Adam grew up in South Texas, spending many childhood hours under the shade of a honey mesquite. She earned her undergraduate degree in anthropology and English from the University of Texas at Austin and her Ph.D. in historical geography and anthropology at Louisiana State University. She has published poems and essays in various journals, including Nature Conservancy Magazine and The Christian Science Monitor. She now lives in South Texas, where she spends many hours in the shade of a Texas ebony. This is her first full-length collection of poetry.