Hands That Break & Scar

In language that is both achingly honest and meticulously poetic, Chavez chronicles the passage from childhood to young womanhood in California's Central Valley, negotiating culture, language, identity, sexuality, love, and meaning. It is not that these poems reveal the secret profound nature of things--in Chavez' world, the lines blur between violence and love, joy and struggle, memory and transcendence, the sacred and the mundane. One thing flows into another and back again. Hands That Break & Scar will leave an indelible mark on your heart, reminding you that poetry, beauty, and life are everywhere--within and without.

– ire'ne lara silva, author of Blood Sugar Canto

The poems in Hands That Break and Scar work as a sort of mosaic, vividly portraying a bi-cultural, working class--and often precarious— childhood in the rough world of California’s hot Central Valley.  This community is as stressed as it is vital--and children become vigilant and self-sufficient at an early age.  In one poem, two children lay down together between the short walls they’ve built with their own hands from dumpster bricks, where they “gazed at the stars, held hands, and felt at home.”    In another, the speaker tells us that a tattoo artist’s hands “are the only things I think about, the only things I can picture.”   "I long for the heat she’ll create,” she writes--"this tattoo proof that she touched me.”   For this poet, human hands can be the source of both pain and salvation, and Chavez celebrates the moments of true joy and grace to be found in simple physical acts and otherwise ordinary situations.   “I climbed the ladder,” she says, “reached out my arm/ placed my fingers on the fruit’s smooth skin,/ twisted it away from the stem/ and handed it down to my grandmother/ whose hair danced lightly in the breeze.”   This is a stunning first book, filled with brilliant images, hard truths, and honest hope.

– Corrinne Clegg Hales, author of To Make it Right

Each word, each line in Hands That Break and Scar draws the reader into a trail of well-crafted poems with touching and tragicomic narratives. In poems such as the aptly titled, "Running Into Things,", Chavez uses an ironic but effective tone to describe an uncle's drunk driving accident: "it would only take a couple / hundred bucks to fill the hole." Likewise, other poems, from "Thirteen and Catholic," and "Neighborhood Watch," approach sensitive subjects in similar manner. The result is a collection that is not afraid to show the poet's sizable scars, even as it treats them at times like they were minor bruises.

– José B. González, author of Toys Made of Rock