Gioconda Belli came to fame as a militant Sandinista and ardent feminist when she won the prestigious Casa de las Américas Poetry Prize awarded by Cuba in 1978. This prize was preceded and followed by several other literary awards in her native Nicaragua. Because of these prizes, Belli is best known as a poet, although she has been amply recognized as a novelist and essayist. She is also the author of at least one children's book and a book of memoirs. Her poems began to appear in such Nicaraguan journals and magazines as El Gallo Ilustrado (The Enlightened Rooster), La Prensa Literaria (The Literary Press), and Nicaraguac since 1970; more recently they have been collected in several anthologies of Spanish American authors as well as in anthologies of translations to several other languages. Belli's poetry has been characterized primarily as both erotic and political in content. Each of...