Selected by Andrea Jurjević
Stark light flooded the Urgent Care lobby as I read Yaccaira Salvatierra’s poetry collection Sons of Salt while waiting for my own son. I had grabbed her book on my way out to the clinic after being drawn in by its cover art: Delilah Montoya’s haunting photograph of a woman with a large Lady of Guadalupe tattoo across her back standing in the desert, her back turned to the viewer.
While the title of the collection is an allusion to Lot’s wife, who turned into a pillar of salt after looking back at the burning city of Sodom, these poems take place in Oakland, California. In Sons of Salt, Salvatierra casts a compassionate yet unflinching look at single mothers raising sons while simultaneously lifting communities in need of support. This is a rich tapestry of poems. The visual and poetic languages are woven together, while Spanish is interlaced with English.