Word: mora
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Aunt Carmen's Book of Practical Saints, the newest work from Chicana poet Pat Mora, is an attempt to create a literature to accompany the particular religious traditions of New Mexico. Overflowing with luscious color photographs of religious folk art (everything from pine wood statuettes of Jesus to napkins embroidered with the images of saints), Mora's book consciously tries to capture the combination of humility and religious pride that makes folk art so captivating. She attempts to give a voice to the shaky hands that manifested their faith through carving and sewing and painting...
...project is not an easy one. Mora must, in a sense, create a new religious language: a language for dusty missionary churches, tremendous desert vistas and rusty trailer parks...
...this, Mora wisely decides to inhabit the mind of an aged Chicana named Aunt Carmen. The poems in Mora's books are presented as the secret prayers of Aunt Carmen, a strong-willed eighty-year-old house cleaner, to the various saints that make up the religious infrastructure of Southwestern Catholicism. Through Carmen, Mora explores the issues at the heart of religious faith...
...results of Mora's experiment with folk religion are, unfortunately, mixed. It is a fine line she must walk between the grandeur of religious language and the earthiness of folk traditions, and she often errs on one side or the other. As a result, her poetry can sound stilted at times. "Light enters you through every pore/dissolves you into itself," she writes in "Our Lady of the Annunciation." The imagery is too grand and abstract to touch the reader on a visceral level and too removed from the dirty realities of desert life to sound authentic...
...rule changes they've been emphasizing with players' safety in mind, which is good," Mora said...