In 2000―three years after the disappearance of her father, who left Oaxaca to work on farms in California―Alma sets out on a perilous trek north with her sister, Rosa. What happens once she reaches the US is a journey from despair to hope. Timeless in its depiction of the depths of family devotion and the blaze of first love, Luz conveys, with compassion and insight, the plight of those desperate to cross the US border.

    Born into a family known for advancing art in Latin America, Varela lived briefly in Paris in the late '40s and '50s where she quickly became friends with Andre Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Michaux, Simone de Beauvoir, Alberto Giacometti, and in particular, Octavio Paz, who called Varela "the most secret, timid and natural of them all."Returning to Lima in the '60s, she established herself as one of Peru's key literary intelligentsia. The poems in Rough Song, these "flowers for the ear," range wildly in form, from two lines to seven pages long, and each presents a world of intense precision in language, fully conscious of reality and its metaphysical limits—“yes / the dark matter / animated by your hand / it’s me." Varela’s deceptively simple poems hold a mysteriously delicate weight far beyond their length. A formidable voice in Latin American literature, Blanca Varela is destined to inspire awe and summon new readers for years to come.These haunting songs unfold with the mysterious precision of fractals, bending their interiors into pliant, living forms. As I get to know Blanca Varela's work, in Carlos Lara's beautiful translation from the Spanish, my ear becomes attuned to the smallest moving gradations, the spider that "doesn't dare descend one / more millimeter toward the ground," a surrealism I associate with Alejandra Pizarnik, Henri Michaux, and I'm so grateful to have come to it. -Alexis AlmeidaWhat a surprise to find in the work of this mid-century Peruvian poet a mind and style that so resonate with my own. Varela's poems are almost violent in their suddenness, their brevity. Unsentimental and often bleak, they are always surprising. Discovering her enlarges my picture of the world. -Rae ArmantroutIn Rough Song, Blanca Varela uses language to create “on the empty plate” and cuts reality open. Originally written in the '70s, this work remains both unpredictable and surprising. In these pages she condenses and transmutes the world into text and texture so that what emerges is legible and sharp. Here “the word / slithering / will be your footprint.” Let us follow. -Gabriela Jauregui

    "This is the type of comics George Orwell could appreciate" - Tom ShapiraEve is unemployed after leaving university and is immediately conscripted as a soldier working for a corporation and discovers just how South American countries are being exploited to create food needed to feed the increasing population for their profit under the guise of western paternalism.Written in the late 80s by Pat Mills (Nemesis the Warlock, Slaine) but even more relevant today as the concerns about global capitalism are even more pronounced in the public consciousness.Carlos (Judge Dredd) Ezquerra's painted colour artwork is a highlight of his long and distinguished career.

    With women of color feminisms and decolonial theory as frameworks, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez juxtaposes Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic diasporic artists, analyzing work by Nelly Rosario, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Trifonia Melibea Obono, Donato Ndongo, Junot Díaz, Aracelis Girmay, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ernesto Quiñonez, Christina Olivares, Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, Ibeyi, Daniel José Older, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Figueroa-Vásquez’s study reveals the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another.Decolonizing Diasporas examines how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in these works by tracing interlocking structures of oppression, including public and intimate forms of domination, sexual and structural violence, sociopolitical and racial exclusion, and the haunting remnants of colonial intervention. Figueroa-Vásquez contends that these diasporic literatures reveal violence but also forms of resistance and the radical potential of Afro-futurities.This study centers the cultural productions of peoples of African descent as Afro-diasporic imaginaries that subvert coloniality and offer new ways to approach questions of home, location, belonging, and justice.

    Each colorful page is a celebration of strength and diversity, with lyrical, proud prose and spectacular imagery highlighting cultures, art, and geography in Mexico while encouraging girls to value and center themselves.