She was the serious one, the one with the talent, the one whom God made a little stern, with big eyes that took in all the world around her, from the tropical heat of Puerto Rico, to the cold tenements of William Carlos Williams' Paterson, where half the year she lived as though paying penance for an entire family's ambition. Is it any wonder this young girl grew up to be a poet, a novelist, and a taker of incredible artistic risks? As her talents grew, she began to think of herself as belonging, oddly, to two nations, a Northern and Southern hemisphere that corresponded to her own fluidity, her ability to change genre in the middle of a sentence.
Ortiz Cofer has long been one of America's cultural heroes. Now she strips back the legends of her youth to help us see the seeds of creativity which, or so some day, we all have been born with, even when obscured by circumstance. After reading this collection, you will be moved to do some "silent dancing" of your own.