Happy Holidays! This is a reflection turned poem that I replay in my mind often but particularly in holiday seasons. Published in the December 2024 issue of WALTER Magazine!
May this season awaken in you beautiful and necessary memories and a brighter hope!
Currently in presales at Finishing Line Press! Will ship on March 31, 2023! Get ready to feel “The Fire!”
From Finishing Line Press:
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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.
La Profesora's Pen 