Variations in Blue

The poems in Variations in Blue cycle through the traumatic residue of dysfunctional relationships, the complexities of Latinx representation through a series of ekphrastic poems, and reimagine Nicaragua as a homeland set in a volcanic landscape. Each section contains a series of poetic variations on a theme, and the poems reverberate and rotate through the indeterminacy of language. Najarro’s Variations in Blue insists that the complexities of experience must be understood one version at a time, each distinctly unfolding its unique design.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Variations in Blue is a meditation on how the personal is inextricable from time and place. Oscillating between what is, what was, and what might’ve been, Adela Najarro’s beautifully wrought poems offer up myths and loss, yearnings and magic as richly depicted as the volcanoes of Nicaragua, her family’s homeland.”—Cristina García, author of Vanishing Maps

“One right after another, the poems of Adela Najarro’s latest poetry collection, Variations in Blue, are like the startling rat-tat-tat of not-so-distant gunfire or a sudden backfire of a car racing down the street.

Her detailed descriptions carry us from a Nicaraguan green world where geographical and human volcanoes loom, from the deceptively calm rainforest to urban landscapes north of the US’s southern border with Mexico. Her poems recreate the lush world of her ancestral home, populated by iguanas, pericos, crocodiles, warriors, and saints that walk among everyday people.

The geography of these poems are portals to other ways of ‘seeing.’ They also contain many bones and are sharp-edged like glass or mountains and skyscrapers that tear at the sky. There is beauty, but there is also pain.

The voices of Najarro’s ancestors and familia call out from those verdant lands, wanting to be heard and reckoned with her place in El Norte. In these poems, so much is seen and unseen, but if you walk into her landscape and feel all the spaces between her words, you’ll know you have been there yourself. This poetry collection is heart-led, a feast for the eyes, ears, and soul.”—Odilia Galván Rodríguez, author of The Color of Light: Poems for the Mexica and Orisha Energies and coeditor, along with Francisco X. Alarcón, of the award-winning anthology Poetry of Resistance Voices for Social Justice.