Aurora Levins Morales

“Aurora Levins Morales's poetry radiates wisdom, warmth, and fortitude. A prophetic, life-centered guide for times of tumult and struggle.” —Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents Rimonim is a richly woven tapestry of poetry meant for use. From a time of rupture and uncertainty, beloved movement poet Aurora Levins Morales brings us a prayer book for the street, for reconstituting the future through our gestures in the present. In these poems of devotion and protest, Levins Morales speaks across and through time with an undeniably prophetic voice. Written in collaboration with various communities looking to honor, unravel, and rebuild Jewish liturgies, Rimonim is a book of lyric in the most immediate sense—of poems that are meant to be read and sung. Rooted in tradition and flowering in the tumultuous present, these poems will both accompany specific Jewish practices and offer inspiration for the sacred work of human liberation, where joy meets justice. Ultimately, these forty-nine poems honor the forty-ninth year, when it was taught that everything in the land would begin anew, everything redistributed and freed, when the people would see that everything on this earth was “ready to wake and bloom / just under the skin of what is.”

The Story of What Is Broken Is Whole collects for the first time fifty years of writing by Puerto Rican Jewish feminist and radical thinker Aurora Levins Morales. Combining well-known excerpts from her books with out-of-print and harder to find ephemeral works and unpublished pieces, this collection weaves together stories of bodies, ecologies, Indigeneity, illness, travel, sexuality, and more. As Levins Morales reflects on her use of storytelling as a tool for change, she gathers the threads of lives and places sacrificed to greed and extraction while centering care for our individual bodyminds and those of our kin, communities, and movements. This comprehensive and essential collection provides an unprecedented window into the breadth and depth of the work of one of the most significant thinkers of our time.

The Story of What Is Broken Is Whole collects for the first time fifty years of writing by Puerto Rican Jewish feminist and radical thinker Aurora Levins Morales. Combining well-known excerpts from her books with out-of-print and harder to find ephemeral works and unpublished pieces, this collection weaves together stories of bodies, ecologies, Indigeneity, illness, travel, sexuality, and more. As Levins Morales reflects on her use of storytelling as a tool for change, she gathers the threads of lives and places sacrificed to greed and extraction while centering care for our individual bodyminds and those of our kin, communities, and movements. This comprehensive and essential collection provides an unprecedented window into the breadth and depth of the work of one of the most significant thinkers of our time.

In the late 1890s a US congressman argued that the United States had the right to seize Cuba because he believed it was made of silt that had washed out of the mouth of the Mississippi River which made it literally US soil. That story inspired Puerto Rican Jewish poet Aurora Levins Morales to apply for a writing residency in New Orleans, and to travel the length of the river from Minnesota to the Gulf Coast, doing "poet research."In Silt, she follows the pathways of water across the natural and social landscapes of the Mississippi River and the Caribbean Sea, tracing the real residues of their relationship, and turning that long story into a kind of prayer, for our waters, ourplanet and our lives.

In this revised and expanded edition of Medicine Stories, Aurora Levins Morales weaves together insights and lessons learned over a lifetime of activism to offer a new theory of social justice. Calling for a politics of integrity that recognizes the complicated wholeness of individual and collective lives, Levins Morales delves among the interwoven roots of multiple oppressions, exposing connections, crafting strategies, and uncovering the wellsprings of resilience and joy. Throughout these twenty-eight essays-twenty-one of which are new or extensively revised-she exposes the structures and mechanisms that silence voices and divide movements. The result is a medicine bag full of techniques and perspectives to build a universal solidarity that is flexible, nuanced, and strong enough to fundamentally shift our world toward justice. Intimately personal and globally relevant, Medicine Stories brings clarity and hope to tangled, emotionally charged social issues in beautiful and accessible language.

In this revised and expanded edition of Medicine Stories, Aurora Levins Morales weaves together insights and lessons learned over a lifetime of activism to offer a new theory of social justice. Calling for a politics of integrity that recognizes the complicated wholeness of individual and collective lives, Levins Morales delves among the interwoven roots of multiple oppressions, exposing connections, crafting strategies, and uncovering the wellsprings of resilience and joy. Throughout these twenty-eight essays-twenty-one of which are new or extensively revised-she exposes the structures and mechanisms that silence voices and divide movements. The result is a medicine bag full of techniques and perspectives to build a universal solidarity that is flexible, nuanced, and strong enough to fundamentally shift our world toward justice. Intimately personal and globally relevant, Medicine Stories brings clarity and hope to tangled, emotionally charged social issues in beautiful and accessible language.

First published in 1999, the groundbreaking Exile and Pride is essential to the history and future of disability politics. Eli Clare's revelatory writing about his experiences as a white disabled genderqueer activist/writer established him as one of the leading writers on the intersections of queerness and disability and permanently changed the landscape of disability politics and queer liberation. With a poet's devotion to truth and an activist's demand for justice, Clare deftly unspools the multiple histories from which our ever-evolving sense of self unfolds. His essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home: home as place, community, bodies, identity, and activism. Here readers will find an intersectional framework for understanding how we actually live with the daily hydraulics of oppression, power, and resistance. At the root of Clare's exploration of environmental destruction and capitalism, sexuality and institutional violence, gender and the body politic, is a call for social justice movements that are truly accessible to everyone. With heart and hammer, Exile and Pride pries open a window onto a world where our whole selves, in all their complexity, can be realized, loved, and embraced.

First published in 1999, the groundbreaking Exile and Pride is essential to the history and future of disability politics. Eli Clare's revelatory writing about his experiences as a white disabled genderqueer activist/writer established him as one of the leading writers on the intersections of queerness and disability and permanently changed the landscape of disability politics and queer liberation. With a poet's devotion to truth and an activist's demand for justice, Clare deftly unspools the multiple histories from which our ever-evolving sense of self unfolds. His essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home: home as place, community, bodies, identity, and activism. Here readers will find an intersectional framework for understanding how we actually live with the daily hydraulics of oppression, power, and resistance. At the root of Clare's exploration of environmental destruction and capitalism, sexuality and institutional violence, gender and the body politic, is a call for social justice movements that are truly accessible to everyone. With heart and hammer, Exile and Pride pries open a window onto a world where our whole selves, in all their complexity, can be realized, loved, and embraced.

Aurora Levins Morales was born in rural Puerto Rico in 1954, of Puerto Rican and Ashkenazi Jewish parents. A lifelong feminist and radical, artist and activist, storyteller and historian, her writing bridges the gap between the intimately personal and the global, between sensual experience and theory. In Kindling she explores the meanings of sickness and healing, suffering and pleasure, through the story of her own body, of all our bodies, of the body of the planet. Kindling is a collage of prose poetry, poems, essays, performance pieces and memoir, exploring the rich complexity od living in a physical and social body. From 19th century bomba dancers to the environmental causes of epilepsy from eugenics to the Cuban health care system, from the sexuality of the chronically sick and tired, to a broader interpretation of taking back the night, Levins Morales writes with passion and insight, self-revelation and global, historical perspective.

The extraordinary Muna Lee was a brilliant writer, lyric poet, translator, diplomat, feminist and rights activist, and, above all, a Pan-Americanist. During the twentieth century, she helped shape the literary and social landscapes of the Americas. This is the first biography of her remarkable life and a collection of her diverse writings, which embody her vision of Pan America, an old concept that remains meaningful today.