"Angelina Sáenz's poetry is ferocious, defiant, and brave. A powerful testimony of a woman caught in a maelstrom who refuses to drown."
― Carla Trujillo, author of What Night Brings
Angelina Sáenz tells life stories (hers, ours) viscerally and with a hard-won clarity: stories of teachers, students, mothers, children, lovers, partners, friends, neighbors, against and beyond the backdrop of the urban Los Angeles evoked in her personal history (and her name), a place of utopias in the concrete. There is struggle in Edgecliff, violence and loss, but also joy and a deep sense of what Audre Lorde calls the uses of the erotic, as well as a biting and delicious class-conscious humor that animates list poems with unforgettable titles ("How to Eat a Free-Lunch Bologna Sandwich") and short lyric bursts that are like jagged knives confronting us with the city most would rather not know: "my muertos' blood pooled on your corners." Like the elders evoked in these pages (Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Gioconda Belli), Sáenz knows that institutions won't save us (read the anthemic "Dear professors (all of you fuckers)"!), and that we must begin by summoning the voices of our streets, our embodied geographies, from Nayarit to Edgecliff Drive and beyond. Forget the overly workshopped niceties, this debut collection will leave you another kind of mfa: más fuerte aún (music for all).
― Urayoán Noel, author of Transversal and Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico
"Edgecliff is an astounding portrait of a working mom's life told with jaw dropping honesty and a rhythm that is frankly arousing. So much is the beauty – painted in images of cockroaches, evictions, broken bonds and shattered things, big brown bodies clashing against cognitive dissonance and structures not meant for us – that I am left envious to have not lived them all myself.
― Erick Galindo, five-time Telly Award-winning writer, director and producer and author of Sin Miedo podcast productions
"Every poem in Edgecliff feels like a short film of Angelina Sáenz's memory that you can taste, smell, and feel in your bones. You will dance to the rhythm of the words. You will cry. You will laugh. You will be transported. And at the end, feel honored that she shared her world with us."
― Megan Tan, Podcast Host and Producer
"Even while humidity wraps Angelina Sáenz's "heart in banana leaves," she is brimming with laughter, compassion and g
