When You Were Human

This collection of poetry offers readers multiple entry points to discover the Virgin Mary- as the miraculous mother of God and as the archetypal spiritual mother of all. By examining how Mary is introduced to us through prayer candles, car air-fresheners, ritual prayer, legend, and high art, this collection attempts to understand the devotions to Mary that unite people all over the world, especially in Mexico. Mary has over twenty-two thousand identities world-wide, but this collection only scratches the surface of those stories focusing on her as the unifying Virgin of Guadalupe, La Virgen de San Juan de Los Lagos, and La Virgen de San Juan del Valle, and these poems meditate on her role as the compassionate, redeeming Mother of God. In a variety of traditions, she is united with nature-as the Goddess of Water, Yemaya, as Creator Goddess Coatlicue, as Tonantzin, as friend, companion, as intercessor, and as the spirit of a fellow human being who has experienced the deepest human suffering, the loss of her criminalized child to the violence of the state. The poems are political, reverent, fresh and varied in style. The collection includes an epilogue in Spanish by Levi Romero and translated by poet Julieta Corpus. The epilogue is a soulful response to the last section of the book, "Bitter Sorrows," which is an adaptation of the Seven Sorrows of Mary prayercycle, in which Mary's life story becomes lyric, prayer, gift and mystery.