Sombra: (dis)locate

by Raina J. León

In this book, the poet converses with spirits of the living and the dead, spirits tied to location and dissembled by dislocation. The book offers a scrying cartography, exploring liminality with poems that exist at threshold. They are situated very much in the vibrant present with an eye towards the prophetic, itself a balance between shade and light, the dismal and ecstatic.

88 pages, Paperback

Published November 7, 2016

About the author

Raina J. León, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006) and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, has been published in Minglewood, The Cherry Blossom Review, Natural Bridge, African American Review, OCHO, Spindle Magazine, Black Arts Quarterly, Poem.Memoir.Story, Womb, Boxcar Poetry Review, Salt Hill Journal, Xavier Review, MiPoesias, Torch, Poetic Voices without Borders, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade, Growing Up Girl: An Anthology of Voices from Marginalized Spaces, AntiMuse, Farmhouse Magazine, Furnace Review, Constellation Magazine and Tiger's Eye Journal among others. Her work is forthcoming in The Externalist and Sixers Review. Her first collection of poetry, Canticle of Idols, was a finalist for both the Cave Canem First Book Poetry Prize (2005) and the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize (2006) and is now available through Wordtech Communications. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She headed the High School Literacy Project at the University of North Carolina and is currently teaching English and Spanish at an American high school in Germany.