Sheryl Luna is an accomplished poet and writer whose work has appeared in literary journals, including The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, and Feminist Studies. She has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series and for the Colorado book award. Her second collection, Seven, was published in 2013. She has taught at the University of Colorado in Boulder and Metropolitan State University in Denver. She currently teaches workshops for a community mental health center.
“Sheryl Luna’s debut collection, Pity the Drowned Horses, poses
several questions about the meaning of ‘home’: is it rooted to a
particular place? can we escape it? can we find it elsewhere? once
we’ve left, can we return? . . . She circles through various
locales and landscapes, including San Francisco, New Orleans,
Washington, D.C., Prague, and Paris, but like the frayed-wing hawk
who drifts through the collection, Luna’s speaker is drawn,
slightly battered, back to the desert of her origins.” —Latino
Poetry Review
"[A] heartfelt testimony from the borderlands, the place where
music clanks like chains as history simultaneously crumbles and
rebuilds itself, where weary dancers laugh anger away. …a
triumphant debut and worthy of keeping company with the classic
titles of border literature. Luna proves herself a leader among the
next generation of Chicano poets."—El Paso Times
"In her opening poem, Luna declares that 'pain is living and living
is pain,' but while she relentlessly probes the hardscrabble lives
of many of America's Latinos, these poems aren't grim reading.
They're transfigured by this debut author's extraordinary lyric
power." —Library Journal
"... there's a weighty mournfulness to Luna's borderlands, where
the stark poverty of Mexico butts against the brash, unyielding
sprawl of her American city. Pity the Drowned Horses takes its
reader across a ravaged landscape where ... the last few hares
sprint across a bloodied/highway and there are women everywhere/who
have half-lost their souls/in sewing needles and vacuum-cleaner
parts. In this world of little comfort, Luna is intent on seeking
meaning—however bitter—in the emptiness and meditating on the
redeeming power of language."—The Texas Observer
"From Sylvia Plath to popsicle-sellers in Juarez, from Mozart to
maquiladoras, this stunning debut collection charts 'the way of
borders....the way things thirst.' Remarkable!" —Lisa D. Chavez
"Sheryl Luna’s book Pity the Drowned Horses bears witness not only
to the poverty and wonder of the borderlands, to their dynamic and
often tragic clash of cultural rivers, but also to an intense,
tender, and unflinching sensibility refusing the easy distance of
mere reportage. Rarely do we encounter a poet with such associative
speed, such free access to her unconscious resources, who
simultaneously reaches out with such heartbreaking clarity and
sweep of vision. Here we see the moral imagination made both
vulnerable and bold by its transfigurative investments, its
impassioned music, its raw energy and recovering grace. A dazzling
debut." —Bruce Bond
“In Pity the Drowned Horses, Sheryl Luna carves out of the El Paso
landscape the music of the borderlands where loss and acceptance
converge. . . . Luna exquisitely captures—like no other poet before
her—the ‘unsung positive capability/ of the desert’; her
syntax—sometimes raw and edgy—creates a tableau where everything
rushes toward ‘our wild need, all sweat, all shiver.’ The overall
effect is simply mesmerizing.” —Robert Vasquez
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