“In training to be a woman without shame” And, it seems, no longer censoring herself at all. In two previous collections - Loose Woman (1987) and My Wicked Wicked Ways (1994) - Cisneros depicted a strong-minded, strong-willed woman making her way through the pain, challenge, connections and comedy of life.Īnd the woman in most of the poems of Woman Without Shame is similarly strong-minded and strong-willed, but now no longer young. It was the only way for me to get past the worst censor: Myself.” She came to understand that “poetry had to be written as if I could not publish it in my lifetime. In the acknowledgements section of the new collection, she notes that she has written poetry “because I had to push a truth out of my womb” - needed to create the poem but felt uncomfortable putting it out for people to read. Through it all, Cisneros, who started as a poet, has continued as a poet. Her memoir in the form of a collection of essays, A House of My Own, came out in 2015. Her fiction includes the hefty novel Caramelo (2002) and three novellas - Have You Seen Marie? (2012), Pura Amor (2018) and Martita, I Remember You (2021) - as well as a short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek (1991). “Push a truth out of my womb”Ĭisneros, who was born in Chicago in December, 1954, is a major figure in Mexican-American literature, best known as the author of the 1983 book The House on Mango Street, a perennial high school text with more than six million copies in print. Will no one, she asks, create lingerie “for women of exuberance”? So, she does herself:Īnd nipples capped with silver aureoles. A cruel aesthetics.” These are garments meant to exile lonely female souls “to the Siberia of celibacy.” She is writing about herself and other women “who have squash-/blossomed into soft flesh,” women whose once lacy undergarments have been replaced by “feed sacks and ace/bandage straps. Do not go into that good night wearing sensible white or beige.” In a playful jumping off from Dylan Thomas’s 1938 poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” Cisneros writes in “Canto for Women of a Certain Llanto” that she’d rather go without underwear than put on ugly stuff made for women of a certain age: “Rage, rage. She thumbs her nose at her prudish Catholic upbringing and, lovingly, at her prudish Catholic mother. She laughs at the frenetic lusts and couplings of youth - at broken hearts and confusions. In her new book of poetry Woman without Shame, Sandra Cisneros looks aging in the face and laughs.
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