LESLIE CONTRERAS SCHWARTZ
LESLIE CONTRERAS SCHWARTZ

FROM THE WOMB OF SKY AND EARTH, winner of the C&R Press Nonfiction Contest

Through intimate lyrical prose and fractured, nonlinear snapshots, From the Womb of Sky and Earth recounts a poet’s coming-of-age through a maze of abusive relationships and mental illness, woven through with glimmers of fierce love and ferocity. Punctuated by meditations on mythology and the Maya creation story, Contreras Schwartz examines the journey to hard-won autonomy, resilience, and self-discovery through motherhood.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Leslie Contreras Schwartz’s nonfiction debut is a book of witness that refuses to look away. As Contreras Schwartz’s stunning sentences wend their way around personal trauma and motherhood, structural racism and misogyny, bodies ill and bodies sexualized, and legendary death lords and misunderstood miracle workers, we as readers also can’t look away—it’s that magnetic, electric, incantatory. Time and again, these essays uncover the secret shared spaces between the corporeal and the ecstatic, that which we inherit, and that which we must tear down to start anew.  In lending such careful lyric attention to her subjects, Contreras Schwartz’s essays become re-dedications of the so-called ‘whole stories’ of our world.  This book is brilliant, beautiful, wrenching, and wholly badass.”
–Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers

“From the Womb of Sky and Earth is a tremendous memoir, exploring everything in the world with brutal honesty: motherhood, childhood, violence, the body, trauma, friendship, power. With gorgeous, evocative prose, Leslie Contreras Schwartz shows how joy and darkness reside side by side. This book is an extraordinary, necessary work about pain and the complexity of survival, a work of exploration and witness; read it now.”
–Karen E. Bender, author of Refund, 2015 National Book Award finalist

“From the Womb of Sky and Earth is haunting and visceral. Contreras Schwartz wades into deeply personal water, drawing on cultural myths and histories to navigate recollections of harm and struggle. Through swells of memory, the prose reveals ways to do more than survive. From the Womb of Sky and Earth is about learning how not to be crushed by waves of indignity; how to preserve and exalt oneself.”
–Donald Quist, author of Harbors and To Those Bounded Donald Quist

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ABOUT BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA (FlowerSong Press, 2020):

In stunningly varied forms and voices, BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA, examines the individual versus public bodies and documents narratives of those usually silenced, including people with mental illness, sex workers, women who are trafficked, and children in custody.

“Resplendent in formal range, in image-richness, in music, empathy, and wisdom, the poems of BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA offer us a landscape of dissociation, of fragmentation in selfhood and in art. To fracture, these poems demonstrate, can be a wildly creative defense of the traumatized self. “We’ve all cracked/in our own ways,” Leslie Contreras Schwartz writes, and goes on to show us how, in a choir of voices—missing children, victims of sex trafficking, sex workers, border detainees, family members, and the always-hungering self. To experience this collection is to encounter the “wild self choired, corralled in a thought box,” where “all of us together/can make a great sound,” a definition of lyric poetry if there ever was one. As a fellow traveler, I am grateful for Schwartz’s vision—that to name the break, to delineate the parts, is to bring forth a singular, sacred wholeness. BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA establishes an aesthetic of survival.”

—DIANE SEUSS, AUTHOR OF frank: sonnets, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

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