Another America/Otra America

Before becoming the bestselling author we know today, Barbara Kingsolver was a fresh college graduate who had just moved to Tucson, Arizona with hopes of open space and adventure. What she found was quite different, "another America" that she chronicled through her poetry, in which she came to share her home with refugees and committed to paper their tragic stories of life at and beyond the borderland.

Interweaving past political events from the US-backed dictatorships in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, to the government surveillance carried out in the Reagan years, Kingsolver's early poetry expands into a broader examination of the racism, discrimination, and troubled immigration system she lived beside. They coalesce in a record of her emerging adulthood, in which she confronts the realization that the national myth of America she'd signed on to was a hypocrisy -- a realization that would come to shape her not only as an artist, but as a citizen.

Written with a balance of clarity regarding America's shortcomings and empathy for her subjects, Another America is a luminous book of poems, a deeply moving and beautifully crafted exploration of American society and our individual place within it. As in her fiction, Kingsolver's poetry rings with a richness of language and spirit, eloquently expressing her insights with great compassion.

With a new introduction from Kingsolver that reflects on the current border crisis, Another America is a striking portrait of a country separated by those with privilege, those without, and the lives that are lived in between.

“" Barbara Kingsolver belongs in the company of such poets as Clifton, Levertowv, Hogan, Forch”

"Barbara Kingsolver belongs in the company of such poets as Clifton, Levertov, Hogan, Forch� and Rich. Her pure American voice, chorded in both the great American languages, is rich with political and human resonance."--Ursula K. LeGuin
"[Kingsolver's] poems present a vision of an underprivileged America redressed, and are, in that respect, songs of hope and longing as opposed to howls of protest and despair."--Foreword Magazine
"Each poem is a true story; with some I was moved to tears."--Isabelle Allende
"The best of American political poetry, melding emotion and analysis, daily life and national issues, voice and heart."--Booklist
"These poems made me stop mid-book, telephone a friend and brave saying the unsayable - palabras del coraz�n that often go unsaid."--Sanda Cisneros
"This powerful collection of poetry deals with protest against political and social repression experienced by ordinary people, particularly women, under military regimes in Central and South America during the last 20 years. Through vivid imagery and compelling messages, Kingsolver makes a passionate appeal to end the suffering of victims of revolution, oppression, and war." --School Library Journal

Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955 and grew up in rural Kentucky. Her books, in order of publication, are: The Bean Trees, Homeland, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike, Animal Dreams, Another America, Pigs in Heaven, High Tide in Tucson, The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer, Small Wonder, Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands, with photographer Annie Griffiths, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, The Lacuna, Flight Behavior, Unsheltered, How To Fly (In 10,000 Easy Lessons), Demon Copperhead, and coauthored with Lily Kingsolver, Coyote's Wild Home. Kingsolver was named one the most important writers of the 20th Century by Writers Digest, and in 2023 won a Pulitzer Prize for Demon Copperhead. She won the Women's Prize for Fiction for both Demon Copperhead and The Lacuna, the first author in the history of the prize to win it twice. She has two daughters, Camille and Lily. She and her husband, Steven Hopp, live on a farm in southern Appalachia where they raise an extensive vegetable garden and Icelandic sheep.

Before becoming the bestselling author we know today, Barbara Kingsolver was a fresh college graduate who had just moved to Tucson, Arizona with hopes of open space and adventure. What she found was quite different, "another America" that she chronicled through her poetry, in which she came to share her home with refugees and committed to paper their tragic stories of life at and beyond the borderland. Interweaving past political events from the US-backed dictatorships in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, to the government surveillance carried out in the Reagan years, Kingsolver's early poetry expands into a broader examination of the racism, discrimination, and troubled immigration system she lived beside. They coalesce in a record of her emerging adulthood, in which she confronts the realization that the national myth of America she'd signed on to was a hypocrisy -- a realization that would come to shape her not only as an artist, but as a citizen.Written with a balance of clarity regarding America's shortcomings and empathy for her subjects, Another America is a luminous book of poems, a deeply moving and beautifully crafted exploration of American society and our individual place within it. As in her fiction, Kingsolver's poetry rings with a richness of language and spirit, eloquently expressing her insights with great compassion.With a new introduction from Kingsolver that reflects on the current border crisis, Another America is a striking portrait of a country separated by those with privilege, those without, and the lives that are lived in between.

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