Encantado: Desert Monologues

by Pat Mora

Inspired by Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town , Pat Mora brings us the poetic monologues of Encantado, an imagined southwestern town.

Each poem forms a story that reveals the complex and emotional journeys we take through life. Mora meanders through the thoughts of Encantado’s residents—the mothers and sisters, brothers and fathers in whom we see slivers of ourselves and our loved ones—and paints a portrait of a community through its inhabitants’ own diverse voices. Even the river has a voice we understand.

Inspired by both the real and imagined stories around her, Mora transports us to the heart of what it means to join in a chorus of voices. A community. A town. Encantado.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 2018

About the author

Pat Mora (born 1942) is a female Mexican-American author and poet. Pat Mora was born in El Paso, Texas. She is married and has 3 grown children.

Reviews

[Emma Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Encantado: Desert Monologues is a lovely and emotion-provoking collection of poems. Encantado contains poem stories from many different points of view; men, women, rivers and even death. The thread connecting all of the stories comes from el río, the river. Each poem is a personal window into the speaker's life. Spanish language is woven into each poem and it deepens the story it tells. The poems touch the heart and make readers long to be near el río. This would be a nice book for a 5th grader.

I would use this book in my classroom to use for a poetry unit. I would select certain poems from the collection to point out the structures that make the poems. Since many of the poems are written in different ways, there are a lot of examples of different styles and structures of poetry.
I would also use this book to incorporate a different language perspective in my classroom. Since this book is filled with phrases and words from another language, it would be a great way to point out multiple perspectives to my students and get them to recognize diversity in literature. It would be kept in my classroom library for my students to read and experience.

This was a WOW book for me because I had never read anything like it before. Mora brings a gut-wrenching yet heartwarming perspective into this collection of poems. I love how Spanish is intertwined with English. It was an interesting way to read poems as well as being eye-opening to a different cultural perspective.

I read this book as an e-text.

[Madelyn Leen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poetry book is from one of my favorite children's book authors. After attending a lecture and book signing of Pat Mora, I fell in love with this book from a small poem that she read out loud. I would use this book as a read-aloud in a 4-5 grade classroom. I think this book is amazing because it offers small poems to read to students aloud. This book also incorporates Spanish which is a great way to make ELL students feel more represented in the classroom literature.
- I would use this book in a read aloud to students when wanting to incorporate various types of literature into the classroom read aloud. I feel that students lack an exposure to poems and texts of this nature. Furthermore, the Spanish incorporated in the poems allows opportunities to teach new languages!
- I would also use this book if I was working with student sin small reading groups. We could read and dive deeper into the poem to determine some vocabulary and text structures.
This is a WOW book for me because I love Pat Mora and I love this poem book. It offers deep and complex books into the classroom! Also, I love learning Spanish from the text!

[Megan]

I really enjoyed this collection of poetry that's centered around the desert town of Encantado. There's such a good sense of character and place, of history and future, in the individual monologues and in the collection as a whole. Two of my favorites can be read at Google Books here ("Father Louis" followed by "Becky").

[Caitlin]

Pat Mora's Encantado rolls like the waters of the river that flows through its page: from intertwined character to character, from landmass to bee, the poems are linked to each other and to land. There are also shades of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo here, in the voices that comprise the town of Encantado, though those voices are not as desperate as the ones we meet in Comala.

[Isaac Salazar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rife (in a good way) with intimacy and personal moments that always connect to the land and, most importantly, to the río. The poems have so much music, which is bolstered by Mora’s deliberate bilingualism. So many voices, yet all are the same:

“Song in the river. / River in the land. / Land in the light.”

[Melissa Rochelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

April is National Poetry Month! So I took a brief break from Erilea to dive into this gem of a collection filled with poems about a Southwestern river town and the people that live there. I'd read a whole novel about them...especially about the fellow leaving notes in books and the woman he's leaving those notes for.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems were rather delightful and intriguing. I like the fact they were set all in one place and the characters all lived there.