Maria Sabina

My latest female poet obsession!

Maria Sabina -- Selections -- by Alvaro Estrada

A shaman and visionary--not a poet in any ordinary sense--María Sabina lived out her life in the Oaxacan mountain village of Huautla de JimŽnez, and yet her words, always sung or spoken, have carried far and wide, a principal instance and a powerful reminder of how poetry can arise in a context far removed from literature as such. Seeking cures through language--with the help of Psilocybe mushrooms, said to be the source of language itself--she was, as Henry Munn describes her, "a genius [who] emerges from the soil of the communal, religious-therapeutic folk poetry of a native Mexican campesino people." She may also have been, in the words of the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, "the greatest visionary poet in twentieth-century Latin America."

Above Excerpt from frontlist books