Lingering whispers of the departed echo throughout this volume of short fiction. At a Día de los Muertos celebration attended by those left behind—and loved ones who have moved on—Pati, dead for twenty-nine years, remembers when her daughter came out and is amazed that Emma Elisa still builds an altar for her. Miguelito remembers his Mamá, his father who transitioned to a woman and lost custody of her son to her traditional, tyrannical father.
ire’ne lara silva’s stories are rooted in mythical realism, in liminal spaces that don’t differentiate the voices of the dead from those of the living, that navigate borders and borderless places fearlessly to bring us the stories of gods, mortals and animals. An extraterrestrial relates an eyewitness account of Malinche and the Conquest. Santísima Muerte opens a taco truck in Austin and finds love. A woman blinded by hummingbirds and distracted by multiple lovers struggles to find her purpose.
The pieces in this tender yet fierce collection consider grief, death and love, all through the prism of indigenous beliefs. Highlighting the importance of art, spirituality and relationships in healing wounds from generations of trauma, ire’ne lara silva explores how stories inhabit the body—the mythologized, sexualized, historicized, embattled body—and how different kinds of desire fuel imagination towards transformation and wholeness. The characters in these stories are driven by their gods, echoes of the dead and their desire to love—and to create.
“These stories travel the infinite borders of life-death-rebirth, in the lush storytelling language of poesia. The language of abuelitas, abuelitos, the Ancestors, the light of our bodies. The Serpent Goddess Coatlicue whispers, ‘I am the mother of myself…And this is how the world never ends.’ A prayer. A blessing.”—Alma Luz Villanueva
“These stories are meant to sit with you, plumb into the depths of your body as they explore what is ephemeral & what is eternal about our existence on this earth. Written at times with humor, with fierceness, with whimsy, with tenderness & always with love, the light of your body shines light on souls that endure beauty, pain, longing, love, loss and bliss, artfully reaffirming that every one of us is a miracle—just for being.”—Natalia Sylvester
“In the light of your body,ire’ne lara silva demonstrates mastery of prosody, rhythm, incantation, and storytelling. Like Cormac McCarthy —and with as much syntactical duende—she can lead us in and out of worlds, allow us to pass between many borders, between the dead and the living, the real and the imagined, between pre-covid consciousness and now. The poetry pulls you into the stories, into the souls of the characters, like Antonio, a man who cannot stop hearing the dead talking at him and around him. This reading experience is total immersion. These rhythms, images, and stories are a passport to cross into the spirit world, like a coyote leading across a border, or Charon on the River Styx, and they can bring the reader into that liminal space, that border in between, in and out of Nepantla.”—Daniel Chacón
“Like a stealth panther gliding toward you, ire’ne lara silva’s magical stories will stop you in your tracks to ponder the sublime peril crouching closer. You’ll find you can’t resist the power, the mystery of stories so intimate that you feel yourself inside mystical creatures that transform you. Whether the alchemist of blue horses or nesting hummingbirds or the musicians named Los Ocoletes wandering in another realm or the enigmatic woman with a penchant for hibiscus tacos, silva brings to life characters so otherworldly that you want to inhabit the spaces that see, feel, smell, and love from such distinct perspectives.”—Emma Pérez
“The light of your body is a feast of passion and lush delights. Silva traverses the landscape of Chicano identity in this collection of fearsome and earthy loves: fabulist tales of miniature Tejano musicians in the afterlife; a woman births flowers and trees; the Aztec god of the dead runs a taco truck in East Austin; a woman consumes her cake-girlfriend. Gorgeous and haunting, these stories traverse borders of time and
space, of the body, of the soul, and lay open the intricacies of the heart.”—Marcela Fuentes
IRE’NE LARA SILVA, the 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections: furia, Blood Sugar Canto, Cuicacalli/House of Song, FirstPoems and the eaters of flowers. She has also written two chapbooks, Enduring Azucares and Hibiscus Tacos, a comic book and a short story collection, flesh to bone, which won the Premio Aztlán. She is the recipient of the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters Shrake Award for Best Short Nonfiction, a 2021 Tasajillo Writers Grant, a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award and was the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award.
