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Pity the Drowned Horses is the winner of the first Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. This collection is about place and many of the poems in it are set in the desert southwest on the U.S./Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. Sheryl Luna’s poems are also about family and home within the broader context of the border as both a bridge and a barrier. They deal with the bilingual and bicultural city and how a place is longed for and viewed very differently as the observer changes and experiences other cultures.
The first two sections of poems focus on home and family. They show that, despite poverty and geographical isolation, the border towns of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez are places of beauty and promise. The third section explores cultures: how anxiety over aesthetic judgments, values, and difference are negotiated. The final section is one of praise and recognition that despite differences we are all longing for faith and a place to call home.
“In Pity the Drowned Horses, Sheryl Luna carves out of the El Paso landscape the music of the borderlands where loss and acceptance converge. . . . Luna exquisitely captures—like no other poet before her—the ‘unsung positive capability/ of the desert’; her syntax—sometimes raw and edgy—creates a tableau where everything rushes toward ‘our wild need, all sweat, all shiver.’ The overall effect is simply mesmerizing.” —Robert Vasquez
Sheryl Luna is an accomplished poet and writer whose work has appeared in literary journals, including The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, and Feminist Studies. She has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series and for the Colorado book award. Her second collection, Seven, was published in 2013. She has taught at the University of Colorado in Boulder and Metropolitan State University in Denver. She currently teaches workshops for a community mental health center.