Border Duende

In the poetry collection, Border Duende, Gina Valdés gifts the reader with intimate portrayals of lives lived in the United States-Mexico border region. With her duende as guide, the poet invites the reader to witness the tensions, perils, joys, and magic of life on the borderlands. She explores the themes of migration, identity, and cultural shifts through a Mexican-American lens with a wide-angle perspective that values merging and variation and that celebrates a bilingual, bicultural existence in poems written "under the spell of two tongues". She beams a light on the book's characters unwavering resitance to the discrimination they sometimes face and on their choice of self-empowerment. In the central poem, "Border Duende," the duende speaks and chronicles a journey of familial class and gender tensions. The poetic voice, clear and accesible, is heightened by bilingualism, wit and humor, and evocative and inventive language in poems that are mostly short and lyrical and at times musical and incantatory, proving that duende-inspiration and soul-is present in this award-winning poetry collection.