SOURCE: "Inter-Sexual and Intertextual Codes in the Poetry of Bernice Zamora," in MELUS, Vol. 7, No. 3, Fall, 1980, pp. 55-68.

In the following essay, Sánchez examines Zamora's focus on relationships between men and women in "Sonnet, Freely Adapted," "California," and "Gata Poem." She also discusses intertextual aspects of these works, noting how they have been influenced by and respond to other texts.

In Restless Serpents, her first collection of poems, Bernice Zamora presents us with a poetry of conflict. Most of these poems attempt to redefine relationships between men and women, and the conflict which propels them, as sexual. Sexual dilemmas motivate Bernice Zamora to articulate an unsaid of male-female discourse: her poems convey what women have not said to men, or what men have not permitted women to say or, what men themselves traditionally have not said.

The unsaid in Zamora's poetry is linked to problems both of...