In Stories We Thunder - Full Length Poetry Book (Personalization available)

Summary: V. Ruiz’s In Stories We Thunder V. Ruiz’s full-length collection, In Stories We Thunder, depicts the difficult and hopeful work of healing. Here, a bilingual mother writes letters of advice to their hija, balancing forgiveness and self-preservation in the face of the enormous obstacles of their world: sexual assault, racism, and drug addiction. The mother’s family become ravens and jailbirds, winged creatures that are separated from them. Here we see the closeness among tíos and abuelas and we are drawn into this experience. In Stories We Thunder tracks the emotional and fraught path of a family discovering themselves while they build a life in a world filled with harshness they cannot escape. As the speaker explains to their hija, “a bird can be winged but flightless." As the hija and mother explore the freedom their ancestors did not have, they are also forced to reckon with the danger that comes with it. Nevertheless, Ruiz is relentless in their optimism. The tío finds forever peace, and hija dances a new dream for the family. This collection is forthright and concrete in its remembrance of trauma, yet perseverant in its search for joy and human goodness. The result is a collection that will leave readers awakened to the nuance of the lives of this family but not despondent, no, for there is hope contained herein.

“I love the voice of V. Ruiz in these poems that believe in lyric abandon, believe in making their own mythology and their own singing out of our shared days, believe that singing is possible still in this time of misfortune and crisis, believe that lineages ring with truth and truth speaks to us via senses. Poet is a professor of five senses Lorca taught us, and V. Ruiz knows this and is ‘not afraid of what lays in darkness.’ This is a true poet, friends, one who knows spells exist and knows that ‘pounding / becomes an echo we find our voices / in the sounds that return as ghosts.’ Terrific, memorable, necessary debut.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa

“In their luminous debut, In Stories We Thunder, V. Ruiz builds new myths that feature lessons on both the timeless and the ephemeral—the moon and the jukebox. The ocean and Pedro Pascal. Reading this collection is like looking into a kaleidoscope—there are entire galaxies in this small space, and they change with each new glimpse. ‘We will learn / to find new worlds in the words / we pass on—’ Ruiz writes, ‘in the women we become.’”
—Paige Lewis, author of Space Struck

“A powerful blend of the mythic and authentic, In Stories We Thunder is a book of poems that is made of all four elements. These visionary poems sing of both history and the present moment, an electrifying debut.”
—Ada Limón, author of The Hurting Kind