SOURCE: “Rethinking the ‘Eyes’ of Chicano Poetry, or Reading the Multiple Centers of Chicana Poetics,” in Women Poets of the Americas: Toward a Pan-American Gathering, edited by Jacqueline Vaught Brogan and Cordelia Chavez Candelaria, University of Notre Dame Press, 1999, pp.113-29.

In the following excerpt, Candelaria discussesEmplumada, From the Cables of Genocide, and individual poems of Cervantes in order to examine her growth as a poet.

A post-World War II California native, Cervantes (b. 1954) is a tenured professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder where she teaches creative writing and literature. Her first published volume, Emplumada (1981), continues as one of the most critically acclaimed, late Chicano Renaissance titles, and her From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (1991) has received similar notice.¹ Her work was included in volume two of the prestigious fourth and fifth editions of The Norton Anthology of American Literature (1994 and...