The Music of Her Rivers: Poems

The Music of Her Rivers pays homage to the rivers that taught the poet - the Rio Grande and the Chicago and Illinois Rivers. Sharp-eyed and empathetic, Golden serves as a witness, documenting place, history, and people, especially those left voiceless due to violence or discrimination - from the refugee border crossers of the Rio Grande to the Irish immigrants and former slaves struggling to build lives in Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each poem captures the enduring challenges of Native peoples, laborers, naturalists, and immigrants through its haunting and consuming verse. Throughout the collection the nuanced representation of the landscape allows the rivers to become witnesses and actors themselves. ACCLAIM "Her rivers are urgent witnesses; her rivers sing truths, shimmer in the darkness. Here are songs pure as water to nourish and cleanse us in the season of lies." - Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street "The rivers in Renny Golden's poems are both borders and bridges between the people and the land, in the history they somehow write together." - Tom Montgomery Fate, author of Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father's Search for the Wild "Renny Golden's formidable powers as a poet shine through in these intensely personal and political poems. She gifts us with a tale of two rivers and the people whose lives have depended on them. An activist and a contemplative, Golden invites readers not only to witness but to act." - Demetria Martinez, author of Mother Tongue "The poet Renny Golden testifies, for the Rio Grande and Chicago Rivers and the stories they contain. Her poetry inspires with its models of engagement, as a former Dominican Sister, as a citizen." - Carole Simmons Oles, author of A Selected History of Her Heart: Poems ABOUT THE AUTHOR Renny Golden is an activist and award-winning author. Her book Blood Desert: Witnesses, 1820-1880 (UNM Press) won the WILLA Literary Award for poetry in 2011, was named a Southwest Notable Book of the Year in 2012, and was a finalist for the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award.