Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. In BOOMERANG, Brenda Cardenas creates a vibrant, syncretic space open to many voices, perspectives, and tongues. Here, whatever is made is in motion. Cardenas casts a line of English, and it returns to her in Spanish. She spins lyrically taut free verse; sculpts prose poems, sapphics, and sonnets; and punches the rhythms of spoken word in what Juan Felipe Herrera has called "a sonic calligraphy, hand-thrown spirals of spirit." Whether telling stories of displaced peoples and places, responding to Chicano art, or meditating on language itself, Cardenas strikes a deliberately tenuous balance between self-assurance and loss, all the while on a journey toward the interconnectedness that she calls home.
