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PRAISE
Tectonic Tongues / Lenguas Tetónicas is a series of tender, deeply-felt, intimate poems in English, Spanish, and Spanglish that resist literary categorization. They cross multiple borders: between languages and identities, poetry and choreography, writing and visual art; and between Ecuador, Mexico, San Francisco, and Boston. As a fellow border-crosser, I identify with her poems that dance their struggle between languages and locations.
Stephanie’s unique poetic voice and her understanding of resistance comes from her performing, dancing body. Her poems are full of sensual, visceral, kinesthetic and erotic metaphors that beg to be performed. Yet they are so detailed that they ask to be carefully read.
Her work can be considered body-based poetry: a poetic/critical scholarship, where words and politicized bodies meet in tense queer intercultural feminist manifestos in movement. As she puts it, “my tongue attaches my body parts when it speaks... the bodies become people when they speak.” It is a must-read for feminists, border-crossers, dancers, romantics, nostalgics, city-lovers, and activists across the Américas.
—Guillermo Gómez Peña
Feminist in its foundation and in the star-filled firmament it paints, Stephanie Sherman’s Tectonic Tongues shapes words into blazing flowers “that shake thunder under a world built on [our] supposed silence.” Stephanie reminds us we can say NO to oppression with our lips painted red, because “Eve’s skeleton never needed foreign filaments…her skin curving comfortably around the wholeness of her contents.” And so too, we. These poems awaken and anoint the reader with the claws and wings needed to soar safely in a jagged world.
—Susana Praver-Pérez
Stephanie Sherman’s Tectonic Tongues is an arrestingly good collection. By turns ferocious and meditative, savage and tender, angry and elegiac, these poems demonstrate not just a remarkable emotional and intellectual range, but a true poet’s sensitivity to and delight in language. From the battlegrounds of the erotic to the contested space between cultures to the unexpected beauty of the world, Sherman’s explorations are penetrating, vivid and original.
—Gary Kamiya
The poems in Stephanie Sherman’s collection of poetry, Tectonic Tongues/Lenguas Tetonicas, mark the deep and the shallow places where sexuality, defiance, patriarchy and feminism interact. The book’s fluidity of themes often merge her bi-national Latino/a cultural awareness with her bi-sexuality. Sherman’s poetic counter narrative to gender rules and expectations are plied with ironic and wily verses rooted in her feminism and disdain of the exploitation of women everywhere. Her style is bold, colorful and she creates richly textured images that enhance both her erotic poems and her poems of social resistance. All the poems in this collection are translated into Spanish by the author herself, accentuating the rich nuances of her poetry while expressing her affection for “America Latina”.
—Naomi Quiñonez
POETRY BIO:
Stephanie Sherman has been writing in English, Spanish, and Spanglish since 2001 and has published her poems in various San Francisco anthologies, including The Best of Mission at Tenth: 2009-2019, Mission at Tenth Vol. 7, and Poetry in Flight / Poesía en Vuelo: Anthology in celebration of El Tecolote, and Editorial Carishina published her chapbook Alucinando en Quito in Ecuador in Spanish in 2007.