Eat the Mouth That Feeds You — Carribean Fragoza

"In gritty, sometimes fantastical stories about Latinx life, women challenge feminine stereotypes and make sense of fractured family histories.This stunningly original collection of stories illuminates a spectrum of Latinx, Chicanx, and immigrant women''s voices. In confrontations with fraught matrilineal lines, absent or abusive fathers, and the effects of historical violence, these women and girls navigate a male-dominated world where they rely on a resilient mujer network to get them through sometimes supernatural obstacles.In visceral, embodied prose, Fragoza''s imperfect characters are drawn with an authentic, sympathetic tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions designed to defeat them. A young woman returns home from college, only to pick up exactly where she left off: a smart girl in a rundown town with no future. A mother reflects on the pain and pleasures of being inexorably consumed by her small daughter, whose penchant for ingesting grandma''s letters has extended to taking bites ofher actual flesh. A brother and sister watch anxiously as their distraught mother takes an ax to their old furniture, and then to the backyard fence, until finally she attacks the family''s beloved lime tree. Victories are excavated from the rubble of personal hardship, and women''s wisdom is brutally forged from the violence of history that continues to unfold on both sides of the US-Mexico border.Carribean Fragoza goes deep. This book makes central the lives of women, whether sourced locally or rooted in Mexico, whether alive or dead to the world, surrealistic or hyper realistic, in the flesh or as spirits centuries old. This is storytelling that astonishes, passing through industrialized lives of women like gamma rays or cosmic rays-and I was not only astonished, I was moved. Kafka said, ''A book must be an axe for the frozen sea that is within us.'' Be careful how you heft this book-it''s sharp as obsidian, this axe.""-Sesshu Foster, author of Atomik Aztex """