Fugues

Alegria is the kind of woman I want to be when I am 72: vibrant, unabashedly sensual, sharp, and still in love with life. This collection of poems, in both Spanish and English translation, is a moving body of water. Alegria's poems send you roaring down a fast river, floating in the calm waters of the great, deep ocean, and dipping your feet in a trickling brook. Her sensuous words and intriguing subject matter make this book a staple in my collection. Alegria tackles love, aging, war, existence, and age-old stories with fresh perspective. Many of her pieces ("Letter to an Exile", "Galatea in Front of the Mirror") approach ancient myths from the perspective of women. She looks at stories told from the view of men, like Odysseus and Pygmalian, and twists them to see how the women involved reacted. The result is provocative feminist retellings of stories men protrayed as romance, but which she portrays as exploitive and abusive, in some cases. Alegria is from El Salvador, but is in exile. She often writes about the wars and coups she lived under as a child and fought against as an adult. These are some of her strongest pieces, and most beautiful. Alegria's works are simple on the surface, but bubble with passion. They are easy to read and understand, but are highly provoking and thoughtful. She forces you to use your brain and heart simultaneously while reading and in this book achieves a glorious collection of material worth rereading.