Marina Rivera is a mature, highly skilled poet who writes not only of her experience as a Chicana--coping with poverty and surviving in an Anglo-American world--but of her universal human experience: of love, loss, anger, and of personal growth. Proud of her heritage, yet sternly individualistic, Rivera speaks to any audience appreciative of serious poetry.

Rivera was born on 9 February 1942 in Superior, Arizona, a small mining town approximately sixty miles east of Phoenix. Although she is a descendant of two large Mexican families, the ancestor who stands out most in her mind is her German maternal great-grandfather, a powerful shipper in what is now the southwestern United States. His parents were killed by Indians when he was very young, and he was adopted into a Mexican-American family. Rivera's mother, like Marina, was born in a small, rural community in eastern Arizona, where she remained throughout her childhood. Rivera's...