Poems by Pat Mora for Young Adults

Product Description: Award-winning poet Pat Mora invites readers into her home in this new collection of forty-nine odes. Inspired by Pablo Neruda's Odas Elemantales and reinvented with a Latina identity, Mora celebrates the ordinary in lyrics that are anything but. Her poetry is the poetry of space — house patterns and adobe constructions — and the human rhythms that happen inside. It is also the poetry of what she loves-chocolate, books, dandelions, church bells, hope, courage, and even rain.

Product Description: Drawing on oral and lyrical traditions, this book honors the grace and spirit of mothers, daughters, lovers, and goddesses. From a tribute to Frida Kahlo to advice from an Aztec goddess, the poems explore the intimate and sacred spaces of borderlands through many voices: a revolutionary, a domestic worker, a widow.

Product Description: The Northern New Mexico tradition of saint carving began in the 1700s as an expression of worship among Catholics in isolated villages. In Aunt Carmen's Book of Practical Saints, Pat Mora extends the tradition to poetry. Through Mora's poems, some written in traditional Spanish forms, we hear the private speech of Aunt Carmen's devotion. From a prayer for a suitable husband to a prayer that the Good Shepherdess guide her to unexpected beauty, Aunt Carmen's poems, each paired with a reproduction of a traditional saint carving, inspire and illuminate.

In Borders, Mora explores the political, cultural, social, and emotional borders that divide people, forming their individual identities. "We begin one of Mora's poems as if embarking on an exploration of an unknown country. When we finish, we have learned so much about its topology we feel we can claim the land as ours. These are arduous expeditions, though, for both writer and reader. You don't plant your flag without earning the right" — El Paso Times

This collection of poetry for young adults celebrates the intensity of the teen years, particularly in matters of the heart. Mora creatively combines English and Spanish in ways that will resonate with bilingual readers. The collection features a wide variety of poetic forms and includes brief descriptions of the forms to guide student writers.

"Mora has selected poems from her adult collections and added some new ones. She speaks of her own experience as a Latina in the Southwest, and of the experiences of those people whose lives have touched her own. Using the metaphor of a cactus, she has grouped the selections into three sections: 'Blooms' (of loves and joys), 'Thorns' (of hardships and sorrows), and 'Roots' (of family, wisdom, home, and strength)." — School Library Journal