Vintage Cisneros is the perfect
introduction to the legendary writings of Sandra Cisneros. A graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
Cisneros is a poet and novelist. Vintage Cisneros is a compendium of her poems, stories and several
chapters from her first novel, The House
on Mango Street.
This
YA novel is the story of Esperanza, a Mexican-American girl growing up in
Chicago. The thirteen-year old’s tone and language suffuse the book with
authentic emotion. In a series of
vignettes, Esperanza assesses her block, her friends, her universe. Though her name means ‘hope’ in Spanish, she
says: “I would like to baptize myself a new name, a name more like the real me,
the one nobody sees.” Of the world, she
says, “You can never have too much sky.”
Vintage Cisneros also bears
selections from Cisneros’ poetry and stories, such as “Eyes of Zapata” (a long story in the voice of his beloved
that serves as a form of tribute to Emiliano Zapata), “All parts from Mexico, assembled in the USA
or I am born,” “Someday my Prince Popocatépetl will come,” “Love Poem for a non-believer,” “You bring
out the Mexican in me,” and others.
The
writing is personal, specific, with beautiful imagery and sentiments that are searing in their honesty. Most times, Vintage Cisneros reads like a
memoir.
For example, in “Preface from My Wicked Wicked Ways,” Cisneros writes,
“What
does a woman
willing
to invent herself
at
twenty-two or twenty-nine
do?
A woman with no who nor how.
And
how was I to know what was unwise.
I
wanted to be [a] writer. I wanted to be
happy.”
--Yolanda A.
Reid
http://www.sandracisneros.com
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emiliano_Zapata
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