Margarita Engle
Poet, novelist, and journalist Margarita Engle was born in Pasadena, California, to a Cuban mother and an American father. She earned a BS from California State Polytechnic University and an MS from Iowa State University, and she studied for her doctoral degree in biology at the University of California, Riverside. From June 2017 to June 2019, she served as the Poetry Foundation's Young People's Poet Laureate. Engle is the author of many children's books and has won several awards. Engle’s writing has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bilingual Review, California Quarterly, Caribbean Writer, and elsewhere. She has received a San Diego Book Award, Willow Review Poetry Award, Jane Addams Award, Claudia Lewis Poetry Award, the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature, and she was a CINTAS fellow. Engle lives in central California and has taught agronomy at California State Polytechnic University. Source
Kinship
Two sets
of family stories,
one long and detailed,
about many centuries
of island ancestors, all living
on the same tropical farm...
The other side of the family tells stories
that are brief and vague, about violence
in the Ukraine, which Dad's parents
had to flee forever, leaving all their
loved ones
behind.
They don't even know if anyone
survived.
When Mami tells her flowery tales of Cuba,
she fills the twining words with relatives.
But when I ask my
Ukrainian-Jewish-American grandma
about her childhood in a village
near snowy Kiev,
all she reveals is a single
memory
of ice-skating
on a frozen pond.
Apparently, the length
of a grown-up's
growing-up story
is determined
by the difference
between immigration
and escape.
Published:
2015
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Children's
Anthology Years:
2023
Themes:
Family
Identity
Immigration
Memory & The Past
Literary Devices:
Juxtaposition
the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect