La Chiflada

Streetlight glow and swinging screen doors, lipstick smudge and secondhand shoes- in her debut collection, Nadia Mota offers the reader glimpses of grief filtered through the lens of girlhood. With sharp-edged iconography, La Chiflada spends time looking at Chicana identity, lineage, and home. Repetition and refrain are a persistent heartbeat that connects these poems and highlights how lived pain mingles with pain that is passed down, how each loss today magnifies the last.