Bøger af Dixie Salazar

When Carmen Luna's brother Tomas is abducted by Immigration (ICE) and taken to an unknown location, she knows her elementary magic will not be enough to free him. Forging a surprising friendship with Chia Yang, a Hmong girl, Carmen joins forces-and magic-with Chia in an effort to free Tomas and save her home from the evil realtor, Mr. Silver, who collaborates with ICE to steal the property and valuables of those who are deported. Together, Carmen and Chia must draw on the knowledge of their ancestors and the strengths of their separate cultures to save Tomas and battle the evil forces that threaten to destroy not only their families-but everyone on Earth.

In Crosshairs of the Ordinary World, the author, Dixie Salazar explores social justice issues such as the pervasive violence in our modern society, incarceration and homelessness filtered through the author's experiential lens. Salazar has taught art in the prisons and currently volunteers on two boards dedicated to solving the local homeless crisis. Avoiding negativity and cynicism, the author searches for and finds elements of hope and redemption in these lyrically inspired poems.

A Jehovah's Witness is stabbed in her home by a stranger she once allowed in. A homeless woman masturbates on a park bench. A statue of the Virgin Mary, "plaster receptacle of petitions and foolish pleas," is found in a dump, a missing hand suggesting the sound of a one-handed rosary. Through images brutally honest and disarmingly off-center, Dixie Salazar explores the hidden lives of everyday people, objects, and experiences--and their transformation in the hidden realms of the heart. Charting furious descents into the darkest crevices of our souls, Salazar paints for us a lost city that exists below our mundane consciousness. "Blood Mysteries" is a tribute to lost souls, from a suicidal mental patient who doesn't believe she exists--"melting out of a landscape spotted with shadows, washing her hands in an empty basin of light"--to Marilyn Monroe, victim even in the morgue. In finely tuned lyricism showing an uncanny grasp of frayed lives, she gives flesh and vitality to women normally encountered only as statistics. The incarcerated, the homeless, the hopeless. Missing young girls who turn up violated and murdered. Salazar presents us with blood mysteries not only of women, but of family as well. In poems invoking her dual heritage, she explores the identity crises brought on by having a Spanish father and a mother from the deep South, leaving her a product of American meltdown with a predisposition to check "other" for race on applications. "Other can be a place," she reminds us, "a residence for those of us without / papers, where halos of lightning bugs / swarm the rickety family tree." Salazar writes with toughness and grit "for all the shipwrecked saints / and wretches among us."But beneath the surface of words sometimes gritty, sometimes playful, lies a testament to the power of empathy, giving voice to those whose voices have been stifled and offering hope for those who have found none. "Blood Mysteries" is a forceful prayer for the disenfranchised that offers not merely hope, but transcendence.