Living on Islands Not Found on Maps - by Luivette Resto (Paperback)

About the Book

All of it centering around inheritance, shame, grief, resilience, spirituality, and the multitudinous roles of women

Book Synopsis

In these vulnerable pages, there are lessons and conversations with Audre Lorde, Tina Turner, Nikki Giovanni, and Naomi Ayala as well as my ancestors, children, the ocean, and me. All of it centering around inheritance, shame, grief, resilience, spirituality, and the multitudinous roles of women.

Review Quotes

Reading Luivette Resto's Living on Islands Not Found on Maps was like sitting down with my best women friends over coffee or wine, body loose, sharing stories of love and heartbreak, memory and family, pain and loss. With absolute candor, Resto writes about the whole range of being the woman she is: daughter, mother, lover, poet, dreamer, and Wonder Woman: "Her fans don't know about.../the bruises on her wrists/from deflecting bullets with gold bracelets, /and the calluses left on palms after lassoing lying kingpins." These poems trade stories until strength becomes vulnerability and vulnerability becomes strength, and we are all restored enough to venture back into the world and all its challenges.

-ire'ne lara silva, author of Blood Sugar Canto and Cuicacalli/House of Song

Luivette Resto's poems celebrate the brujas, raised eyebrows, promised coffee, burn scars, and the language of the moon that we encounter in our daily rituals. Like the hungry tides, this collection challenges the colonized tongue. It beautifully wields sacrifice, humor, and power. From Puerto Rico, to the Bronx, to LA, and to all the uncharted islands in the sea, this is a journey filled with uncharted depths and possibilities, which we find "embedded here / in the pores and cells."

-Juan J. Morales, author of The Handyman's Guide to End Times

Poets travel with their minds, with their memory going places that only they can find. This is what is felt when reading Living on Islands Not Found on Maps by Luivette Resto. Memories of a difficult childhood to adulthood in the Bronx and beyond, these poems express Resto's ability to explore ability to use her imagination to enter and exit those unmappable islands. Spirituality, sexuality, motherhood, daughterhood, trauma, and healing are her themes as she moves in and out of memory and claims her measure of fullness as poet, mother, educator, lover, believer, and citizen, who is "trapping memories in a circle of fire and music" and letting us travel with her onto those islands, or out to sea.

-Patricia Spears Jones, author of A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems and Painkiller

I'm mesmerized by Luivette Resto's hechizos y encantamientos--her poems are prayers from a deep and subtle marrow.

-Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Runn