Praise for MAESTRA

  • Aplausos para (la) Maestra! En este salón de poemas, La Maestra Angelina Sáenz listens/writes with her heart wide open and a class consciousness that captures the many nuances of public-school teaching. Taking center stage in Sáenz’ collection are the too-often unheard voices and stories of barrio children, parents, and educators. A kindergartner shows up to school with a broken thumb and an arm fractured by a steel door that closed on him while he was visiting his father in jail. Another child cries when sharing that their father was whisked away in a plane to El Salvador, “porque no tiene papeles.” Children in these poems are caregivers and alarm clocks for their parents who work the night shift. Children in these poems navigate so much they show up to school and quietly clutch burritos like lifelines. “Let the children play/ Deja que los niñxs juegen,” Sáenz insists while pointing out major failures in public school policy and practices--from packed classrooms to oppressive testing and data collecting to pandemic Zoom teaching madness sans any real structural support. Despite all the institutionalized shenanigans and huelgas in the rain that bring forth little to no change, La Maestra Sáenz is steadfast in her ability to see and love her students (so hard and so tenderly) in and beyond the classroom, reminding them in every poem, “Shine on/ Build your life another way/ Discover and treasure/ the true meaning and value/ of what it is to be you.” A master at capturing layered moments in concise /compact language, Sáenz offers us poems that reveal everyday barrio verdades. The school is often a flawed and cold structure, but La Maestra in this collection is the expanding heart—en vivo y en poesía—of the children and gente she works with.

    --Olga García Echeverría, author of Falling Angels: Cuentos y Poemas

  • Angelina Sáenz’s latest book of poems Maestra is equal parts indictment of the structural inequalities in schools that we allow to continue, a love letter to the children in her Echo Park classroom and their hard-working parents, and a call to arms—a challenge to open our hearts and our eyes to the gifts children bring to our classrooms and to our society—and to stand up for them. How fortunate we are that Señora Sáenz is still at it, nurturing and en-couraging her children to bring their whole self to the classroom and the playground. I had intended to pick just one of her poems to reflect on her place among our finest poets and writers—what a fool’s errand. So, let me just say, nobody, not Clemens, Terkel, or any other American writer sets a scene like our poet laureate of the Barrio. Angelina is a rarity among poets, the embodiment of Con Safos, ready to light you up when you are just asking for a “tune up” and humble enough to tell on herself too. She generously shares a precious gift—the honor of “seeing” the children in her classroom through her eyes and her heart, the heart of the Bodhisattva. Maestra should be required reading in every graduate school of education and public policy school in this country—and every school of theology too. C/S

    --Rubén Lizardo, Co-Conspirator in the Evil Plot to Make the World Better

    Captivating and emotionally charged, this book truly tugs at your heartstrings while also delivering moments of laughter. Angelina masterfully captures the rollercoaster of experiences faced by both teachers and students, encompassing their physical, mental, and emotional joys and struggles. With its healing and empowering message, it's a must-read for anyone who has ever walked the path of a student and educator.

    --Rita Suh, Ed.D., Lecturer at California State University, Long Beach

  • “Hey,you. Yeah you, are not allowed to be invisible in my classroom.”

    Within the pages of teacher Angelina Sáenz’ book of poetry, Maestra, you immediately see what she sees every day, every year, for nearly twenty years.

    You encounter snapshots of the innate brilliance, unyielding capacity to learn, and tender exchanges of love and care between a culturally competent teacher and her pupils. Between a distinguished educator and her school. And between a contemplative daughter, mother, and writer and her proximate loved ones and the larger world that surrounds all of us.

    Simultaneously in gut-wrenching prose, Maestra also illustrates systemic affronts to the deserved dignity of those who fill her classrooms, work in her school community, and share her life.

    We get a front row view to it all as Angelina reminds us that at its core, more than anything, education in the United States and across the globe is a profoundly human endeavor for all involved. An endeavor capable of capturing and cultivating human potential. Or squandering it.

    Will the students, schools, and neighborhoods brought to our collective consciousness by Maestra get the requisite attention, equitable resources, and desired opportunity envisioned for all learners across our nation?

    Only if daily education practice, local school systems, and civic leaders determine, like Angelina, that they will always be seen.

    --Val Cuevas, education equity advocate, policymaker, and funder

Maestra is a meditation on 23 years of teaching in LAUSD at majority brown schools, where some students are in foster care, struggle to make it to class on time with graveyard-working parents and spend weekends visiting incarcerated parents. Señora Saenz, as she was known in the classroom, was a legend at Aldama Elementary School in Highland Park, where she taught for 15 years and revolutionized the system with a successful Dual Language program she founded in 2008. The product of an alcoholic mother who was judged by teachers the way she caught herself doing to no-show parents during conferences, Saenz writes with compassion, depth and realness that only a high school dropout-turned scholar who moonlights as a spoken word poet can. She paints the plight of teachers who strike during storms only to see no real change, deal with disease and displacement, and work for a system that doesn't pay them a living wage. Saenz is straight up and unorthodox, admitting she wrote the book during weekly faculty meetings, which perhaps helped her heal from teaching through the time of Covid as tech illiterate parents stood idly by and the world turned upside down. For anyone who has any doubt about why people go into the teaching profession, this book is for you. Crying in solidarity with a student who was absent because they were saying goodbye to a parent who’s undocumented is not in the job description, but Saenz is down for the task.

--Kamren Curiel, Writer and Mother

Angelina Saenz’s moving new collection of poetry paints a portrait of life aching to push through the barriers that circumscribe the lives of the marginalized. Saenz takes me back to my own days in the K-8 classroom as a public-school art teacher. Her poems are songs that cry out for the humanity of disenfranchised students, families, and teachers; she tells the truth about stressors that routinely burn teachers out. Her writing shows tenderness and respect for the cultures, experiences, and personhood of all her students. She is insightful about the detrimental effects that those teachers who are disconnected from their students can have on our collective present and future. The work is full of atmosphere, joy, and love, merged with a necessary bitter critique of oppressive social systems that we must challenge as conscious members of society. Saenz reveals through this powerful collection pride in her people, family, and culture, sensitively describing her vital role as maestra at a public elementary school in Los Angeles before, during, and after the height of the COVID pandemic.

 --Glynnis Reed-Conway, artist, educator, and co-editor of BIPOC Alliances: Building Communities and Curricula and author of James Baldwin: Novelist and Critic

Maestra Saenz is a teacher, by career and by heart. Her poetry speaks to children who are strong, who are fragile, who are nervous, who are gutsy. Her words speak to what teachers, the good ones, see and do every day. She writes about children who struggle with new homes, with no homes, new languages, new faces in their lives. And she never gives up.  Her own life has not been perfect and it has made her an empath for her students and their families, for. her colleagues and the ladies in the cafeteria. The poetry speaks to how hard it is to be that understanding teacher during Covid and close-downs and teacher strikes and with people who don’t understand.  The poems talk about making children feel valued and their parents understood.  The poems will move you to tears. If they don’t, they should.

--Cheryl Ortega, teacher for 53 years

What people are saying about Edgecliff

  • Angelina Sáenz tells life stories (hers, ours) viscerally and with a hard-won clarity: stories of teachers, students, mothers, children, lovers, partners, friends, neighbors, against and beyond the backdrop of the urban Los Angeles evoked in her personal history (and her name), a place of utopias in the concrete. There is struggle in Edgecliff, violence and loss, but also joy and a deep sense of what Audre Lorde calls the uses of the erotic, as well as a biting and delicious class-conscious humor that animates list poems with unforgettable titles (“How to Eat a Free-Lunch Bologna Sandwich”) and short lyric bursts that are like jagged knives confronting us with the city most would rather not know: “my muertos’ blood pooled on your corners.” Like the elders evoked in these pages (Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Gioconda Belli), Sáenz knows that institutions won’t save us (read the anthemic “Dear professors (all of you fuckers)”!), and that we must begin by summoning the voices of our streets, our embodied geographies, from Nayarit to Edgecliff Drive and beyond. Forget the overly workshopped niceties, this debut collection will leave you another kind of mfa: más fuerte aún (music for all).

    --Urayoán Noel, author of Transversal and Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico

  • Saenz’s voice in Edgecliff is fearless, familiar, refreshingly free of affectation, and marked by a fierceness that holds our immediate attention with intimate stories about poverty, alcoholism, sexual abuse, and single motherhood. Stripped of unnecessary adornment in crystal-clear lyric moments, we are allowed to enter a sacred memory-space where a girl finds joy amid poverty and heartbreak in “pebble gardens” next to “zigzagging staircases,” stepping barefoot on low-lying branches of three-story pines at the northeast corner of Bellevue Park, the woman in pink sweats that always fed her a meal on the corner of Sunset and Maltman, and remembering the mother glowing in a doorway—and not the mother “face down on the sidewalk / passed out” or turned away from men’s violent acts upon her daughter. “I’m looking at you and the light coming from behind you makes you glow like a saint,” Saenz writes. Edgecliff tells us a story of survival out of the snapshots in a woman’s photo album; together, Saenz's poems blaze with the beauty and power of telling the truth.

    --Leslie Contreras Schwartz, 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and the 2019-2021 Houston Poet Laureate, author of Black Dove / Paloma Negra

  • “Even while humidity wraps Angelina Sáenz’s “heart in banana leaves,” she is brimming with laughter, compassion and gratitude in poems that celebrate her sons and catalog her own coming of age as a mother, educator and Buddhist. Recalling the episodes that made her the strong woman she is, the stanzas in Edgecliff show her finding refuge in her second shift and receiving timeless wisdom channeled from her ancestors. These poems meditate on her daily journeys but end up revealing something much more extraordinary. I was inspired by her resilience and reminded by her realness that progress is incremental but when you stay with it, the results are incredible. Angelina Sáenz is for the people.”

    --Mike Sonksen, author of I Am Alive in Los Angeles

  • "Angelina Sáenz’ work is the poetry that must—poetry born of sinew and struggle, born of the necessary hard exterior shell and the heat of the still burning heart within. Sáenz’ voice is unrelentingly honest and spare—powerfully in possession of itself. She writes, ”You add to my trauma/when you non-chalantly talk shit/about my work/which is the story of my people/of my mother/of my ancestors/of the kids that I grew up with/who ended up murdered, in prison or on drugs/of my perpetual grief,” and that same tough and tender voice demands and owns its space in our literature and our hearts, “whatever the fuck I give to you/is an offering of my life and sacrifice.”--

    -- ire’ne lara silva, author of furia, Blood Sugar Canto, CUICACALLI/House of Song, and FirstPoems

  • Edgecliff is the song one woman sings as she peers out over the new world she is fashioning for herself. And as she steps into that world, she pays homage to everything that brought her to this place, here, where she can finally breathe. In her unique, clear-eyed style, Angelina Saenz examines poverty and violation, love and determination, cruelty and stupidity, motherhood and the triumph of birthing oneself against the odds. Edgecliff is a grit chronicle, rhythmic and very much like song. Quiero más.

    -- Donna Spruijt-Metz, author of the chapbook, Slippery Surfaces

  • Angelina Saenz’s stunning Edgecliff takes us to places needing to be seen. Each powerful hit-you-in-the-gut word sounds and rhythms uncover the resilience, the power, the luminosity of a people who are Los Angeles. Saenz sends us on a journey of familia with past and present histories of loss, blood, shame, and survival. James Baldwin wrote, “nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Saenz is presenting us the opportunity to look, and to look intently.

    --Amelia María de la Luz Montes, Americanist (Chicanx/Latinx) LGBTQ scholar

  • Angelina's Sáenz's poetry opens pathways to her most personal life experiences with her stunningly bold and intimate poems. Sáenz walks you down her neighborhood's dark and dangerous streets in search of a loved one whom she finds face down on a street corner. In another poem, she encourages her students to "color outside the lines" on art day. You might tear up after learning that it's all true. There are gifts here. Some are not easily unwrapped.

    --Ron Baca is a poet and lifelong resident of L.A.'s Eastside and is a volunteer tutor at Homeboy Industries.

  • “Edgecliff is an astounding portrait of a working mom's life told with jaw dropping honesty and a rhythm that is frankly arousing. So much is the beauty –– painted in images of cockroaches, evictions, broken bonds and shattered things, big brown bodies clashing against cognitive dissonance and structures not meant for us –– that I am left envious to have not lived them all myself.

    -- Erick Galindo, five-time Telly Award-winning writer, director and producer and author of Sin Miedo podcast productions

  • Trust. That is what the debut poetry collection Edgecliff is asking from us as its readers. Each poem invites and trusts us with its vulnerability, lessons, narratives, and hardships. We live in apartments, get evicted from apartments, listen in on conversations between fathers and daughters, fight with our mothers, watch relationships dissolve and emerge all on the same page. Saenz's work trusts us to relive our own childhood memories, but this time with amor and meditation.

    --Luivette Resto, author of Unfinished Portrait and Ascension

  • Sáenz allows us to truly enter a world where “a beast” takes over a mother’s body. In this collection her poems do not flinch in the face of truth. Edgecliff occasionally breaks from the power of Sáenz's truncated rhythm to offer comic relief, where we are instructed to “3. Break the puto window” and “6. Leave the rest of your life behind”—and for just a moment we do.

    ----Cynthia Guardado, author of Endeavor

  • “Every poem in Edgecliff feels like a short film of Angelina Sáenz’s memory that you can taste, smell, and feel in your bones. You will dance to the rhythm of the words. You will cry. You will laugh. You will be transported. And at the end, feel honored that she shared her world with us.”

    ---Megan Tan, Podcast Host and Producer

  • “In Edgecliff,” Angelina Sáenz’s poems are honest, raw, and unrelenting. Her poems are polaroid snapshots of memories, from a girl’s childhood as chaotic as a hurricane to a dauntless single mother who “creates a different life for herself” and her sons con ánimo y corazon.

    --liz gonzález, author of Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds (Los Nietos Press)