Gina Duran's poems are wise, urgent, embodied, and relentlessly alive. In this book, "a pulsating heart pounds inside the wind," and that wind can be both destructive and healing, a force that comes from both within and outside the body. From the Santa Ana Winds to the Aurora Borealis, Duran powerfully uses the motif of the wind to explore the experience of trauma, sexuality, ancestry, political and ecological suffering, romantic love, and collective survival. These poems chart paths between our precarious human lives, the earth beneath our feet, and the cosmos, calling forth a world without borders.
- Brent Armendinger, author of Street Gloss and The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying
Gina Duran's collection: and so the wind was born" is the poetry of place, of valleys and the Santa Ana winds that blow through them, of stolen glances, of small spaces, of tornadoes that run through veins, of moments that become memory. In these pages, Duran writes of identity and discovery of love and loss of trauma and scars of fire and healing across a vast southern California landscape that is at times breathtakingly beautiful and at others shatteringly desolate. Let this stunning collection carry you like the wind.
- Matt Sedillo, author of Mowing Leaves of Grass
