Book Buzz: The Firetalker’s Daughter | North Carolina Writers’ Network
12 Friday May 2023
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in12 Friday May 2023
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in09 Thursday Feb 2023
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in17 Saturday Dec 2022
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inSo honored to have my work published in this wonderful literary magazine, The AutoEthnographer. These three poem along with a microessay appeared in the Nov. 10 Issue of Bodily Autonomy. #BodilyAutonomy #RoeVWade #USSupremeCourt
https://www.facebook.com/profile/1333254124/search/?q=The%20autoethnographer
17 Saturday Dec 2022
Currently in presales at Finishing Line Press! Will ship on March 31, 2023! Get ready to feel “The Fire!”
From Finishing Line Press:
RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY
The Firetalker’s Daughter honors the power of mother’s love and tender teaching, the value of ancestral gifting and wisdom, the necessity of mourning for movement, and the audacity to hope and act for a more just future. Spun along a motif of fire, these poems carry searing incantations that evoke an awareness of the relevance of the literal, figurative, and spiritual fires that breathe down lines and throughout time.
From NC Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green and Award Winning Author Kai Coggin:
Spiritual incantation and unspoken ancestral magic singed and sparked my heart, as I moved through the language and gospel of Regina YC Garcia‘s debut collection The Firetalker’s Daughter. Charting a path through her lineage of healers and those who could “talk the fire” out of burns and wounds, the gift passed over her, she burns her own powerful impressions of Black Light onto the breaking world, like an ancestor alive and witnessing. “I cannot talk the fire / Yet, I am Fire… Truth / My ancient magic renders demons cold.” Garcia takes the reader into the depths of self, motherhood, social justice cries, the erasure of Black history by the fires of an all-consuming whiteness, mourning a lost daughter in Breonna Taylor, and yet, carrying an unwavering hope in “the rise of indomitable spirits from the embers.” The seeds of generations are scattered in these blazing words, torched open. These poems— a phoenix rising from, all around us, a world of ash.
–Kai Coggin, author of Mining for Stardust, Incandescent, and Wingspan
The Firetalker’s Daughter is an offering, incantation, and invocation that taps into the power physically or metaphorically of fire. Through expressions of the inner self, Regina YC Garcia’s poems tap into the questions of reconciling fearsome nature with goodness and peacefulness as seen through this divine elemental creation.
Scorching imagery and passion create wisps of smoke. Smoldering narratives become lightning bolts and poetic kindling igniting substantive undergrowth for a brighter day. The Firetalker’s Daughterinvites the blaze that always illuminates the before time of far tomorrows.
–Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate
Book Cover Illustrated by Camryn Harrell
11 Saturday Sep 2021
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in9/11: 20 years
planes like bombs blasted into buildings
in the middle of skies
and crumbled them down
lost lives
lost dreams
lost securities
i stood in a library lobby
i watched
feet frozen to the floor
that sad 9th month
11th day
I cried endlessly
thinking “all is lost”
planes like bombs blasted buildings
bombs that broke us
bombs that bonded us
for a while
for realizations
of brittle security
eventually break
common ties
recall empathy
call forth insanity
bring out anger or worse
apathy
over and over
throughout history
we are continually
watching boats, planes, storms, floods,diseases, institutions
These curious instruments
dressed like bombs blasting into
buildings, nations, people, families, hearts
incinerating, crushing, marginalizing, colonizing
enslaving, terrorizing, irreverently ruling
in our lands, in all lands
pulling us in, tearing us apart
leaving memory of tragedy
in one generation
the trauma of the tragedy
in the next
collective traumatic memory
That we carry for generations
to come
left in people who
create people who do not know
how to choose the bonding
over the brittleness and the bitterness
who don’t know
how to make new love
out of old loss
how to mitigate
how stop
the cycles
of people like bombs
blasting into people
i still see this today
feet frozen to the floor
this 9th month
this 11th day
20 years since planes like bombs
blasted into my head, bonded
into my head
we pulled together
we pulled apart
cracked clay pots
in my 54 years of living
my mind still holding so much
collective traumatic memory
waiting and wanting to be acknowledged
to be repurposed
to be reverently built into
a sky of hope
into a world of change
22 Sunday Aug 2021
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in30 Friday Jul 2021
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in
14 Friday May 2021
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inFinding Peace in Pieces
If I do not know it all, I do not know it.
I am holding only a piece that is so much greater than I even know.
As he, she, it, they, I are in constant growth
and creation until their time in this realm is spent, I will never know it all
(as Breath itself creates anew around itself).
Depending on my state, I find this reality either excruciatingly binding
or extraordinarily freeing.
Sometimes there is Peace in this knowledge of not knowing.
It is not my place to know all.
All would likely end me.
Regina YC García
11 Tuesday May 2021
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inSeems to me that to not allow the histories of the people of this diverse country to come forward with the necessary narrative fervor that these histories deserve, “we the people” do ourselves deadly injustice. We deepen the wounds of traumas that yet live, view each other with increasing suspicion, drive apart, marginalize, and subjugate the value of others, and descend into a deep frozen state of animosity, ignorance, and fear.
In essence, we become the antithesis of everything this country has claimed it was trying to be-a “more perfect union”- a progressive concept, at best.
We never really got there, but there were moments; there was hope. Now these pockets of hate and ignorance-racism, sexism, xenophobia are putting down roots in the wet ground of fear, fear that calls evil “Godliness”….gods of small things, threatened by replacement, call on ancient Baals with new faces.
https://www.businessinsider.com/oklahoma-law-bans-lessons-critical-race-theory-2021-5
22 Friday Jan 2021
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in(Just a little light momentary pity fit, you know, “how I be” feeling sometimes, and I write, so…)
From the Middle Torture Chambers…
A middle life
Yields a muffled cry
That no one desires to attend
Few, some, around, at times
For a minute, dispassionatly, adverbally
An adjectivly weak tailspin
For no one yearns
To hear the enlightenments
Of that flattened center space
No one cares for perspectives
That the verve of exotic margins erase
For a middle life predictably draws power
That eats the zeal of the day
No middle magic weilds enough interest
To hold a captive sway
Therefore, moderately blessed
In-betweens and means may often find
That the glory that they seek
Will only torture their minds
Angst and agony painfully increase
While watching long sought dreams
Slowly, completely unwind
And peter out with a gasping wind
As life beckons the middle
Ever closer
To the end