Killing Marias

Praise for Killing Marias: A Poem for Multiple Voices:

Each poem in Killing Marias is addressed to someone named Maria who has been killed in Juarez. Lyric in tradition, they are more love poems than elegies. The poems are full of love, of care, of transnational empathy. This is a book that is unusually moving and beautifully written. -- Juliana Sphar

In this epic poetry collection Killing Marias, Claudia Castro Luna, both poetically and physically, settles spaces that were unclaimed by Latinas. Her inscription of the disappeared women of Juarez is a live cartographic image of struggle and spiritual survival. Castro Luna does not allow for these dead women to lack agency; they nourish us and the earth, and they speak with their bodies, literally, positioning themselves as recovered entities with agency, in the poet’s skilled narrativizing hands. -- Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs

In Killing Marias, each poem is a rosary bead named after a woman’s life in Ciudad Juarez. Each bead reveals a crack of light through which we can peak into the hurt so many women experience from birth to death. Castro Luna’s piercing voice states “exploitation has no limits,” and that “man’s hypocrisy even less.” She dares us to stop being mediocre humans, especially men, and let the “feminine thrive.” -- Javier Zamora