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From Eve's Rib
Gioconda Belli's poetry, widely published and revered in Latin America and Europe, celebrates the longing for a society in which humanity constructs its future, animated by an inextinguishable erotic, maternal, and transcentendly loving desire. As Salman Rushdie wrote in his book, The Jaguar A Nicaraguan Journey, her poetry is "a kind of public love poetry that comes closer to expressing the passion of Nicaragua than anything I [have] yet heard."
121 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
About the author
Gioconda Belli
78 books862 followersGioconda Belli (born December 9, 1948 in Managua, Nicaragua) is a Nicaraguan author, novelist and poet.
Gioconda Belli, partly of Northern Italian descent, was an active participant in the Sandinista struggle against the Somoza dictatorship, and her work for the movement led to her being forced into exile in Mexico in 1975. Returning in 1979 just before the Sandinista victory, she became FSLN's international press liaison in 1982 and the director of State Communications in 1984. During that time she met Charles Castaldi, an American NPR journalist, whom she married in 1987. She has been living in both Managua and Los Angeles since 1990. She has since left the FSLN and is now a major critic of the current government.
Belli graduated from the Royal School of Santa Isabel in Madrid, Spain and studied advertising and journalism in Philadelphia.
In 1988, Belli's book La Mujer Habitada (The Inhabited Woman), a semi-autobiographical novel that raised gender issues for the first time in the Nicaraguan revolutionary narratives, brought her increased attention; this book has been published in several languages and was on the reading list at four universities in the United States. The novel follows two parallel stories: the indigenous resistance to the Spanish and modern insurgency in Central America with various points in common: women's emancipation, passion, and a commitment to liberation. In 2000, she published her autobiography, emphasizing her involvement in the revolutionary movement, El país bajo mi piel, published under the name The Country Under My Skin in the United States; it was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2003. Belli continues publishing and maintains that poetry is her most important work. Belli was the recipient of the Premio de Poesía Mariano Fiallos Gil in 1972 and of the Premio Casa de las Américas in 1978. In 2008 Belli received the Biblioteca Breve Award for her book El infinito en la palma de la mano (Infinity in the Palm of The Hand), an allegory about Adam and Eve in paradise.
Belli's books have been published in numerous languages.
(from Wikipedia)
Gioconda Belli, partly of Northern Italian descent, was an active participant in the Sandinista struggle against the Somoza dictatorship, and her work for the movement led to her being forced into exile in Mexico in 1975. Returning in 1979 just before the Sandinista victory, she became FSLN's international press liaison in 1982 and the director of State Communications in 1984. During that time she met Charles Castaldi, an American NPR journalist, whom she married in 1987. She has been living in both Managua and Los Angeles since 1990. She has since left the FSLN and is now a major critic of the current government.
Belli graduated from the Royal School of Santa Isabel in Madrid, Spain and studied advertising and journalism in Philadelphia.
In 1988, Belli's book La Mujer Habitada (The Inhabited Woman), a semi-autobiographical novel that raised gender issues for the first time in the Nicaraguan revolutionary narratives, brought her increased attention; this book has been published in several languages and was on the reading list at four universities in the United States. The novel follows two parallel stories: the indigenous resistance to the Spanish and modern insurgency in Central America with various points in common: women's emancipation, passion, and a commitment to liberation. In 2000, she published her autobiography, emphasizing her involvement in the revolutionary movement, El país bajo mi piel, published under the name The Country Under My Skin in the United States; it was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2003. Belli continues publishing and maintains that poetry is her most important work. Belli was the recipient of the Premio de Poesía Mariano Fiallos Gil in 1972 and of the Premio Casa de las Américas in 1978. In 2008 Belli received the Biblioteca Breve Award for her book El infinito en la palma de la mano (Infinity in the Palm of The Hand), an allegory about Adam and Eve in paradise.
Belli's books have been published in numerous languages.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 7, 2015
THE POLITICAL AND EROTIC POETRY OF GIOCONDA BELLI
A pleasant offshoot of the revolution in Nicaragua that led to the triumph of Sandinista in 1979 was the blossoming of Gioconda Belli as one of the finest Latin American poets. Born into a well-to-do family accustomed to country clubs, debutante balls, and rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful, Belli had every reason to remain as an affluent elite. It is her deep social consciousness and empathy with the tribulations of folks in the lower ladder of food chain that made her a revolutionary. Her growing sense of identity as an independent woman went hand in hand with a commitment to social reform and political action. She became a militant in the insurgent movement to overthrow the Somoza dynasty, which had initiated its stranglehold on the country in the early 1930s.
Between 1975 and 1979, Gioconda Belli worked for the revolution from exile in Mexico and Costa Rica, distanced for long periods from her three children while she served as international spokesperson for the FSLN (Sandinista) , while a Nicaraguan military court tried her in absentia and condemned her to prison. She returned to her homeland immediately after the 1979 triumph of the revolution, to work first as head of Sandinista television and later in other high-level positions in various Ministries. Alas! Revolutions soon reveal the rifts in solidarity and rhetoric turn into mere rigmaroles without fulfilling promises. Her disappointment of Sandinista movement to end the sexual discrimination in Nicaragua soon distanced her from FSLN party politics. She now divides her time between Managua and Santa Monica, California.
In her struggles as a poet, Belli draws obvious comparison with Pablo Neruda as politics and eroticism are main undercurrents. The bellicose voice of Belli echoes liberation of women from manacles of tyranny and it is no wonder her poems are a celibration of feminity. Intensely erotic and boldly feminist, Gioconda Belli first published poetry that shocked polite society and puritan critics even ridiculed her calling it as “vaginal poetry . . . shameless pornography” though many writers like Salman Rushdie and Harold Pinter hailed her poetry as a whiff of oxygen. Rushdie in his book Jaguar’s Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (a good book on politics of Nicaragua), says Her poetry was at once extremely sensual and politically direct . He also quotes a poem she read an evening and comments about it: Belli’s poems closed the evening. She had created a kind of public love-poetry that came closer, I thought, to expressing the passion of Nicaragua than anything I had yet heard:
Rivers run through me
mountains bore into my body
and the geography of this country
begins forming in me
turning me into lakes, chasms, ravines,
earth for sowing love
opening like a furrow
filling me with a longing to live
to see it free, beautiful,
full of smiles.
The above poem is quite in line with a statement she made during an interview with the quarterly ‘BOMB’ which I think reflects her poetic manifesto : I have often written about my body as a geographical metaphor for my country. When I return to Nicaragua, as I often do, there is that moment when I see the familiar landscape and I have the clear physical sensation that my soul has re-entered my body. I have a symbiotic relationship with that particular landscape, maybe because my sense of self developed in the context of the epic struggle of the Nicaraguan people to topple a dynasty of dictators that ruled the country for 45 years.
From Eve’s Rib is the best bi-lingual collection of her poetry that has appeared in English. Beautifully translated by Stevn F. White, it carries a good introduction by Margaret Randall. These poems, infused with a strong feminist ethos, speak of motherhood and menstruation, love and country, and of course, revolution. Like a bridge between the intimate and the public, they bear out the maxim that "the personal is political." Every beautiful, well-crafted poem in this collection is worth the reader's attention, but my favourite is probably And God Made Me Woman, which opens the book like an invocation. In a society that is oppressive to women, to assert oneself as a women, to be human, to think and act, to praise one’s sex, is subversive and calls for courage.
And God Made Me Woman
With the long hair,
with the eyes,
the nose and mouth of a woman.
With curves
and folds
and soft hollows.
God carved into me a workshop for human beings.
Delicately wove my nerves
and carefully counted
and balanced my hormones;
composed my blood
and poured it into me
so that it would flow
through my entire body.
And so ideas were born,
dreams,
instincts,
everything that was gently created
with hammering whispers
and the drilling motions of love,
the thousand and one things that make me woman every day,
that make me arise proud,
every morning,
and bless my sex.
Though many male poets have praised the beauty of a woman’s body, I have been looking for a lovely poem by a female poet exalting the form of a male. Here is perhaps the best one I have read:
Knowledge of You
I want to taste
your salty, strong flesh.
Start with your arms as splendid
as the branches of a ceiba tree,
then your chest like a cave
in a dream I’ve dreamt,
chest-cave where my head plunges
unearthing the tenderness,
that chest sounding like drums
and life's never ending flow,
I want to linger there
letting my fingers tangle
the black and gentle forest
growing softly beneath my naked skin,
and move then to your navel
to that center where you start to tremble,
kissing and biting you
until I reach
the tight and secret core
welcoming me,
coming at me
with a male's hardened fire.
Slide then down to your legs
firm and strong like your certainties,
the legs that support your whole body.
and bring you to me;
the legs you use to hold me
and wrap at night around mine,
so different, soft and feminine
i would kiss your feet, my love
--they still have so many roads to travel without me--
and then I would go back
to encircle your mouth
until I can possess your saliva, your breath
until you enter me
with the force of the tide
enveloping me with the ebb and flow
of a furious sea
that will wash us ashore
sweaty and spent
on linen sands.
Her female identity is based on a celebration of women’s power, both creative and procreative, yet the contemporary Central American context is evident in her “erotic celebrations” grounded in the reality of war, death, and separation. One of the best poems in this collection is a long poem titled The Dream Bearers , a striking one that proclaims that the dreams, once shared by critical mass people in a system , can never be silenced.
From The Dream Bearers
In all the prophecies
the destruction of the world is written.
All the prophecies foretell
humanity creating its own destruction.
But time and life endlessly renewed
also engendered a generation of lovers and dreamers;
men and women who dreamt not of the world’s destruction,
but of building a world of butterflies
and nightingales.
From an early age, they were branded by love.
Behind their everyday appearance
they hid tenderness and the midnight sun.
Their mothers often found them crying over a dead bird
and years later, found many of them
dead, too, like birds.
These beings lived with translucid women
and left them impregnated with honey and children
who grew like grass under the caress of rainy days.
This is how the dream bearers multiplied in the world,
fiercely attacked by those who bore catastrophic prophecies.
They were called deluded romantics, inventor of utopias.
They were told their words were old—
which was true, since paradise has been an ancient memory
in the heart of humanity.
Those who accumulated riches feared them,
and hurled their armies against them.
But every night the dream bearers made love,
and their seed continued growing in the wombs
of women who not only bore dreams but multiplied them,
and made them run and speak.
This is how the world engendered its life again
just as it had engendered those who invented the way
to extinguish the sun.
The dream bearers survived the cold climates,
but in the warm climates they seemed to sprout
by spontaneous generation.
Perhaps the palm trees, the blue skies, the torrential rains
had something to do with this.
The truth is that these specimens, like hard-working little ants,
never stopped dreaming and building their beautiful worlds,
worlds of brothers and sisters, of men and women who called
each other compañeros,
who taught each other to read, consoled each other
in times of death,
healed and cared for each other, loved and helped each other
in the art of loving and in the defense of happiness.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The dream bearers knew their power
and therefore were not surprised.
And they also knew that life had engendered them
to protect itself from the death announced in the prophecies.
And so they defended their lives even with death.
And so they cultivated gardens of dreams
and exported them tied with big colorful ribbons
and the prophets of darkness spent days and nights
watching the secret routes and the roads
searching for these dangerous shipments
which they never succeeded in intercepting
because the person with no eyes for dreaming
cannot see dreams either by day or nigh
Finally, in her poem "Conjunction," Gioconda invites the inheritors of all literary traditions to feel within them, as she feels within her "the speechless women/ the ones my fingers illuminate/the ones the night carries about time/ writing themselves off in the moon's breath". It is an inspiring poem in every sense.
From Conjunction
Women of the centuries inhabit me;
Isadora dancing with her tunic
Virginia Woolf, a room of her own
Sappho throwing herself from the rock;
Medea, Phaedra, Jane Eyre
and my women-friends
scaring time's aging
writing themselves
shaking off the shadows to pour light on their faces
and being seen at last
stripped of all convention.
Gioconda Belli has earned a deserving niche in Latin American Literature as an outstanding poet and Novelist. Her novel The Inhabited Woman and memoir Country under my skin are already best sellers. Belli’s poetry intensely interweaves feminism, womanhood, motherhood, eroticism, cultural activism, militancy and political commitment. I believe in her dream of women building a world of butterflies/and nightingales.
A pleasant offshoot of the revolution in Nicaragua that led to the triumph of Sandinista in 1979 was the blossoming of Gioconda Belli as one of the finest Latin American poets. Born into a well-to-do family accustomed to country clubs, debutante balls, and rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful, Belli had every reason to remain as an affluent elite. It is her deep social consciousness and empathy with the tribulations of folks in the lower ladder of food chain that made her a revolutionary. Her growing sense of identity as an independent woman went hand in hand with a commitment to social reform and political action. She became a militant in the insurgent movement to overthrow the Somoza dynasty, which had initiated its stranglehold on the country in the early 1930s.
Between 1975 and 1979, Gioconda Belli worked for the revolution from exile in Mexico and Costa Rica, distanced for long periods from her three children while she served as international spokesperson for the FSLN (Sandinista) , while a Nicaraguan military court tried her in absentia and condemned her to prison. She returned to her homeland immediately after the 1979 triumph of the revolution, to work first as head of Sandinista television and later in other high-level positions in various Ministries. Alas! Revolutions soon reveal the rifts in solidarity and rhetoric turn into mere rigmaroles without fulfilling promises. Her disappointment of Sandinista movement to end the sexual discrimination in Nicaragua soon distanced her from FSLN party politics. She now divides her time between Managua and Santa Monica, California.
In her struggles as a poet, Belli draws obvious comparison with Pablo Neruda as politics and eroticism are main undercurrents. The bellicose voice of Belli echoes liberation of women from manacles of tyranny and it is no wonder her poems are a celibration of feminity. Intensely erotic and boldly feminist, Gioconda Belli first published poetry that shocked polite society and puritan critics even ridiculed her calling it as “vaginal poetry . . . shameless pornography” though many writers like Salman Rushdie and Harold Pinter hailed her poetry as a whiff of oxygen. Rushdie in his book Jaguar’s Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (a good book on politics of Nicaragua), says Her poetry was at once extremely sensual and politically direct . He also quotes a poem she read an evening and comments about it: Belli’s poems closed the evening. She had created a kind of public love-poetry that came closer, I thought, to expressing the passion of Nicaragua than anything I had yet heard:
Rivers run through me
mountains bore into my body
and the geography of this country
begins forming in me
turning me into lakes, chasms, ravines,
earth for sowing love
opening like a furrow
filling me with a longing to live
to see it free, beautiful,
full of smiles.
The above poem is quite in line with a statement she made during an interview with the quarterly ‘BOMB’ which I think reflects her poetic manifesto : I have often written about my body as a geographical metaphor for my country. When I return to Nicaragua, as I often do, there is that moment when I see the familiar landscape and I have the clear physical sensation that my soul has re-entered my body. I have a symbiotic relationship with that particular landscape, maybe because my sense of self developed in the context of the epic struggle of the Nicaraguan people to topple a dynasty of dictators that ruled the country for 45 years.
From Eve’s Rib is the best bi-lingual collection of her poetry that has appeared in English. Beautifully translated by Stevn F. White, it carries a good introduction by Margaret Randall. These poems, infused with a strong feminist ethos, speak of motherhood and menstruation, love and country, and of course, revolution. Like a bridge between the intimate and the public, they bear out the maxim that "the personal is political." Every beautiful, well-crafted poem in this collection is worth the reader's attention, but my favourite is probably And God Made Me Woman, which opens the book like an invocation. In a society that is oppressive to women, to assert oneself as a women, to be human, to think and act, to praise one’s sex, is subversive and calls for courage.
And God Made Me Woman
With the long hair,
with the eyes,
the nose and mouth of a woman.
With curves
and folds
and soft hollows.
God carved into me a workshop for human beings.
Delicately wove my nerves
and carefully counted
and balanced my hormones;
composed my blood
and poured it into me
so that it would flow
through my entire body.
And so ideas were born,
dreams,
instincts,
everything that was gently created
with hammering whispers
and the drilling motions of love,
the thousand and one things that make me woman every day,
that make me arise proud,
every morning,
and bless my sex.
Though many male poets have praised the beauty of a woman’s body, I have been looking for a lovely poem by a female poet exalting the form of a male. Here is perhaps the best one I have read:
Knowledge of You
I want to taste
your salty, strong flesh.
Start with your arms as splendid
as the branches of a ceiba tree,
then your chest like a cave
in a dream I’ve dreamt,
chest-cave where my head plunges
unearthing the tenderness,
that chest sounding like drums
and life's never ending flow,
I want to linger there
letting my fingers tangle
the black and gentle forest
growing softly beneath my naked skin,
and move then to your navel
to that center where you start to tremble,
kissing and biting you
until I reach
the tight and secret core
welcoming me,
coming at me
with a male's hardened fire.
Slide then down to your legs
firm and strong like your certainties,
the legs that support your whole body.
and bring you to me;
the legs you use to hold me
and wrap at night around mine,
so different, soft and feminine
i would kiss your feet, my love
--they still have so many roads to travel without me--
and then I would go back
to encircle your mouth
until I can possess your saliva, your breath
until you enter me
with the force of the tide
enveloping me with the ebb and flow
of a furious sea
that will wash us ashore
sweaty and spent
on linen sands.
Her female identity is based on a celebration of women’s power, both creative and procreative, yet the contemporary Central American context is evident in her “erotic celebrations” grounded in the reality of war, death, and separation. One of the best poems in this collection is a long poem titled The Dream Bearers , a striking one that proclaims that the dreams, once shared by critical mass people in a system , can never be silenced.
From The Dream Bearers
In all the prophecies
the destruction of the world is written.
All the prophecies foretell
humanity creating its own destruction.
But time and life endlessly renewed
also engendered a generation of lovers and dreamers;
men and women who dreamt not of the world’s destruction,
but of building a world of butterflies
and nightingales.
From an early age, they were branded by love.
Behind their everyday appearance
they hid tenderness and the midnight sun.
Their mothers often found them crying over a dead bird
and years later, found many of them
dead, too, like birds.
These beings lived with translucid women
and left them impregnated with honey and children
who grew like grass under the caress of rainy days.
This is how the dream bearers multiplied in the world,
fiercely attacked by those who bore catastrophic prophecies.
They were called deluded romantics, inventor of utopias.
They were told their words were old—
which was true, since paradise has been an ancient memory
in the heart of humanity.
Those who accumulated riches feared them,
and hurled their armies against them.
But every night the dream bearers made love,
and their seed continued growing in the wombs
of women who not only bore dreams but multiplied them,
and made them run and speak.
This is how the world engendered its life again
just as it had engendered those who invented the way
to extinguish the sun.
The dream bearers survived the cold climates,
but in the warm climates they seemed to sprout
by spontaneous generation.
Perhaps the palm trees, the blue skies, the torrential rains
had something to do with this.
The truth is that these specimens, like hard-working little ants,
never stopped dreaming and building their beautiful worlds,
worlds of brothers and sisters, of men and women who called
each other compañeros,
who taught each other to read, consoled each other
in times of death,
healed and cared for each other, loved and helped each other
in the art of loving and in the defense of happiness.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The dream bearers knew their power
and therefore were not surprised.
And they also knew that life had engendered them
to protect itself from the death announced in the prophecies.
And so they defended their lives even with death.
And so they cultivated gardens of dreams
and exported them tied with big colorful ribbons
and the prophets of darkness spent days and nights
watching the secret routes and the roads
searching for these dangerous shipments
which they never succeeded in intercepting
because the person with no eyes for dreaming
cannot see dreams either by day or nigh
Finally, in her poem "Conjunction," Gioconda invites the inheritors of all literary traditions to feel within them, as she feels within her "the speechless women/ the ones my fingers illuminate/the ones the night carries about time/ writing themselves off in the moon's breath". It is an inspiring poem in every sense.
From Conjunction
Women of the centuries inhabit me;
Isadora dancing with her tunic
Virginia Woolf, a room of her own
Sappho throwing herself from the rock;
Medea, Phaedra, Jane Eyre
and my women-friends
scaring time's aging
writing themselves
shaking off the shadows to pour light on their faces
and being seen at last
stripped of all convention.
Gioconda Belli has earned a deserving niche in Latin American Literature as an outstanding poet and Novelist. Her novel The Inhabited Woman and memoir Country under my skin are already best sellers. Belli’s poetry intensely interweaves feminism, womanhood, motherhood, eroticism, cultural activism, militancy and political commitment. I believe in her dream of women building a world of butterflies/and nightingales.
December 18, 2022
Gedichte, die um die Topoi des Paradieses und des Kriegs kreisen, sich mit Erotik und Körperlichkeit befassen, manchmal auch alles auf einmal. Schlecht übersetzt, mittelmäßig geschrieben bis auf die berühmten Ausnahmen von der Regel. Erotik artet schnell aus in Lächerlichkeit, Patriotismus bleibt auch dann geist- und literaturlos, wenn er einen Emanzipationskampf antreibt, und mit Pathos muss man umgehen können. Schade.
March 21, 2019
A collection of twenty-seven poems, presented in facing-page Spanish and English, from the Nicaraguan author and activist, Gioconda Belli. I first encountered Belli's work through her novel,
The Inhabited Women
, and I immediately sought out her other books. From Eve's Rib was the only other title then available in English.
These poems, infused with a strong feminist ethos, speak of motherhood and menstruation, love and country, and of course, revolution. Like a bridge between the intimate and the public, they bear out the maxim that "the personal is political." Every beautiful, well-crafted poem in this collection is worth the reader's attention, but my favorite is probably And God Made Me Woman, which opens the book like an invocation:
And God made me woman.
With the long hair,
with the eyes,
the nose and mouth of a woman.
With curves
and folds
and soft hollows.
God carved into me a workshop for human beings.
Delicately wove my nerves
and carefully counted
and balanced my hormones;
composed my blood
and poured it into me
so that it would flow
through my entire body.
And so ideas were born,
dreams,
instincts,
everything that was gently created
with hammering whispers
and the drilling motions of love,
the thousand and one things that make me woman every day,
that make me arise proud,
every morning,
and bless my sex.
These poems, infused with a strong feminist ethos, speak of motherhood and menstruation, love and country, and of course, revolution. Like a bridge between the intimate and the public, they bear out the maxim that "the personal is political." Every beautiful, well-crafted poem in this collection is worth the reader's attention, but my favorite is probably And God Made Me Woman, which opens the book like an invocation:
And God made me woman.
With the long hair,
with the eyes,
the nose and mouth of a woman.
With curves
and folds
and soft hollows.
God carved into me a workshop for human beings.
Delicately wove my nerves
and carefully counted
and balanced my hormones;
composed my blood
and poured it into me
so that it would flow
through my entire body.
And so ideas were born,
dreams,
instincts,
everything that was gently created
with hammering whispers
and the drilling motions of love,
the thousand and one things that make me woman every day,
that make me arise proud,
every morning,
and bless my sex.
January 23, 2023
an absolutely beautiful bundle of book. i simply cannot express how much i enjoyed diving into miss gioconda's world. every time i read a poem that resonated with me, i decided i would tear a piece of paper and use it as a placeholder for these amazing creations. but, as i read on, i found myself tearing apart more paper than i'd like to admit. i've bookmarked almost every poem in 'from eve's rib'. such a remarkable read.
May 2, 2009
Bilingual collection of poetry by acclaimed Nicaraguan poet and novelist Gioconda Belli. I picked this up because I love her poem "Conjunction," which is possibly my all time favorite poem about women and writing:
"Great women monumental women encircle me
they recite their poems sing dance win back their voices..."
I hadn't read many of other poems so this was a great opportunity to get more familiar with her work. The poems are powerful, sensual and filled with absolutely gorgeous imagery. I read them all in my rusty Spanish, then read the translation by Steven F. White, who did a terrific job capturing the beauty of Belli's words. Wow. :-D
"Great women monumental women encircle me
they recite their poems sing dance win back their voices..."
I hadn't read many of other poems so this was a great opportunity to get more familiar with her work. The poems are powerful, sensual and filled with absolutely gorgeous imagery. I read them all in my rusty Spanish, then read the translation by Steven F. White, who did a terrific job capturing the beauty of Belli's words. Wow. :-D
January 6, 2014
Leo muy poca poesía; de hecho, creo que es el primer libro de poesía que termino. Y quizá fue porque era corto. Me gustó mucho... no sé. La prosa era accesible, entendible, sonaba bien sin recurrir a divisiones extrañas ni palabras complicadas. Haber leído "El País bajo mi Piel" antes también influyó positivamente, porque muchas veces sabía (o creía saber) a quién se referían los poemas. En general los de amor no fueron mis favoritos, pero tampoco los detesté. "Los Portadores de Sueños", en cambio me encantó, me fascinó, me pareció bello y esperanzador.
Supongo que esos dos adjetivos califican el libro entero. Recomendable.
Supongo que esos dos adjetivos califican el libro entero. Recomendable.
January 6, 2017
Beautiful poetry about what it means to be a woman and a Nicaraguan rebel. Particularly striking are the first and last poems of the collection, "And God Made Me a Woman" and "Conjunction." As a born-and-raised New Yorker, I also loved her hymn to the Big Apple.
August 11, 2008
como empezar a hablar de la Costilla de Eva? nada mas podria decir que cuando este libro llego a mis manos me cautivo. Nunca habia pensado que alguien pudiera escribir con tanta pasion. Gioconda Belli me introdujo al mundo de la poesia erotica desde la mirada femenina y desde entonces no he dejado de explorarla.
January 18, 2009
Its a collection of different poems that are in her other books as well as others not included in those texts.
November 29, 2012
Lovely and jogs the memory of the horrors of the Reagan years America's right-wing wants us to forget. Made me want to explore all her books.
August 17, 2013
Great poems by a strong woman.
March 31, 2026
Politics and eros. Femininity and passion. As a young woman, these were my themes, and so I feel Belli is a kindred spirit. In these poems, pleasure heightens commitment to revolutionary change. I find the vision limiting, bound by the world of men, eros addressed as men define it, and the poems of social awareness likewise frozen in the time in which they were written. I wonder if her later works reveal a more expansive opening into life.
September 7, 2024
creo que es el poemario que más me ha gustado en la vida, inmediatamente después de bécquer.
August 15, 2024
Those words like a serpent,
slithering in silence, threatening;
denied once, twice, so many times,
dismissed like an evil thought,
a weakness,
a mistake,
something we can't allow
- a shudder so basic
that it takes us to the beginning of the world,
to the elemental language of touch,
the cave's darkness.
My girl. My alluring girl.
slithering in silence, threatening;
denied once, twice, so many times,
dismissed like an evil thought,
a weakness,
a mistake,
something we can't allow
- a shudder so basic
that it takes us to the beginning of the world,
to the elemental language of touch,
the cave's darkness.
My girl. My alluring girl.
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