New Moon / Luna Nueva / Yuninal Jme'tik

Author: Enriqueta Lunez

Translator: Clare Sullivan

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2019)

Enriqueta Lunez's New Moon / Luna Nueva carries the sensations and uncertainties of a dusk-filled landscape; traces of shadows obscuring full view of the horizon, of what's ahead, of one's own likeness. The voice of the poems tracks a series of moving targets––"haughty, I take aim," she proclaims. Moving deeper into their path, into a fraught multiplicity of voices and faces, mortal concerns intersect with divine as souls and bodies are threatened, misplaced, or desperately sought. With "no time for lamenting," Lunez probes the depths of womanhood, trauma, the earth, and of the soul's place within these divides.

"The book itself is a spell, against what binds her to tradition, against what she loses by distancing herself. It begins with the new moon: invisible, dead, ready to be reborn, extinguished. And its first poem asks for death: as a youth, as an adult, as an old woman: just like the moon. Here she curses, dies, laments being a woman, longs to be like other faraway women she imagines, embraces a man, prostitutes herself or dries out beside the fire. Decomposition and decay, emulating outsiders, destroying all the ties that bind a woman to her fate—here or anywhere else."

–Elisa Ramirez