La Chiflada by Nadia Mota

Streetlight glow and swinging screen doors, lipstick smudge and secondhand shoes— in her debut collection, Nadia Mota offers the reader glimpses of grief filtered through the lens of girlhood. With sharp-edged iconography, La Chiflada spends time looking at Chicana identity, lineage, and home. Repetition and refrain are a persistent heartbeat that connects these poems and highlights how lived pain mingles with pain that is passed down, how each loss today magnifies the last.