“Barbara Jane Reyes’s sixth collection of poems is fire—in the colloquial and primordial sense—life-giving, path-lighting. This is a book I know I needed as a young brown girl; it’s a book I didn’t know I needed, still. Reyes’s collection is a gathering place, a site of survival. Part interrogation, part epistle and chronicle, part soundtrack and roadmap, Letters to a Young Brown Girl weaves together songs of experience and wisdom, songs of kapwa and loób, connecting the voices of a lineage of power—from Sugar Pie De Santo to Ruby Ibarra—to create a resounding, multitudinous chorus of young brown women transforming shame into dignity. This book makes me want to throw on my pambahay, raise my glass, and sing!”
—Michelle Peñaloza, author of Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire

“In Letters to a Young Brown Girl, Barbara Jane Reyes is the articulation of rage, power and radical self-love—creating and demanding a space for justice and the value of one’s body, one’s stories, and one’s joy. ‘They say the earth’s most unruly parts sing like you,’ Reyes writes, remembering ancestors’ songs and lovesongs and whalesongs, claiming tongue and narrative ‘no matter what the territory or terrain.’ I have needed these poems my entire poet’s life—these poems that speak to ‘how a brown girl writes and lives,’ that respond with profound love to the urgent plea: ‘how aren’t you afraid, sister … please teach me how to be steel like you.’”
—ire’ne lara silva, author of Blood Sugar Canto and Cuicacalli/House of Song