Guest Review: Earth, Breath, Light, Corazon Emplumado

Guest Reviewer:  Lisbeth Coiman. Earth, Breath, Light, Corazon Emplumado Healing Ancient Wounds, by Jorge Montaño. La Raiz Magazine, October 15, 2024.

Reading Earth, Breath, Light, Corazon Emplumado by Jorge Montaño turned to be an immersion course in Aztec culture. Part Nahuatl, part Spanish, mostly in English, Jorge Montaño’s most recent poetry collection will take the reader through a spiritual journey across urban Los Angeles into the ancestral lands of the Aztecs.

Jorge Montaño is a Chicano poet from Pacoima, CA. As the byline of his Instagram account indicates, “Le canto a lo que florece,” Montaño is inspired by the concept of xochitl and cuicatl, flor y canto, which is Nahuatl for artistic expression. In 2022, he received La Raiz Poetry Prize for his poem “Sangre Indígena.” 

La Raiz Magazine is a community-based, literary journal located in San Jose, CA. It publishes multilingual poetry and visual art. Under Elizabeth Montelongo’s leadership, La Raiz Press chose Earth, Breath, Light, Corazon Emplumado as their debut poetry collection. It was the perfect choice. In Earth, Breath, Light …, Jorge Montaño brings gorgeous visual imagery of Aztec culture to life in poems that are both healing and defiant, magical and funny, all wrapped in exquisite cover art, now a signature of La Raiz publications.

With the willowing smoke of copalero the speaker invokes the gods: Huehuetotl, Coatlicue, Cuetzpalin, Chalchiutlicue. When the feathered serpent “calls upon the west,” the speaker shows how to keep going one day at the time until the last dance with Ozomatli. Earth, Breath, and Light is where urban Chicanism meets Aztec cosmology, where the dignity of the Pachuco is proclaimed in Nahuatl.

Earth, Breath and Light requires active reading to decode both the ancient and colonizer’s vocabulary: xochitl, huitzitl, coatl, miquiztli, mazatl, tonalli, tochtli, ozomatli, copalero, chavalitos, justicia, antepasados. Once the reader steps into the fascinating ancient symbols they become participants in the spiritual experience and the subtle humor. 

Poems become revelations and at times a joke on the reader. Montaño plays with language in a way that he makes the reader believe the poem will lead to a spiritual revelation, when in fact it leads right to a rock band. 

Jorge Montaño’s wisdom shows in Earth, Breath and Light like divine dust: ”love consults not with fear but flirts with the sacrifice of self.” The woman is at the center of this wisdom, whether in the ancestral Aztec symbols “rooted deep inside her precious garden of Huitzlampa” sprinkled in Nahuatl throughout the collection or in the urban references of Chicanism, “La Catrina gazing out the windows of metallic fire,” “the fragrance of earth mother,” in Van Nuys. This woman is sensual and loving but can lure into death. She “calls us to resurrect.” She is flower and hummingbird, a warrior goddess, healing ancient wounds. 

That’s the power of this brief collection. It educates us in Mesoamerican Ancestry while it stands against colonialism,

“And we too rise.

We have remembered our names. 

We have heard the wind. 

It says to resist.”

I hope you love Earth, Breath, Light Corazon Emplumado as much as I do. 

Link to publisher: https://rootsartistregistry.com/laraiz.html

About the Guest Reviewer:

Lisbeth Coiman is a Southern California poet and a valued panelist in the notable Writing from Our Immigrant Hearts (link) touring venues across California. La Bloga will share the panel's upcoming readings, venues, and dates.