In the Company of Spirits

"Carmen Calatayud's courageous poems not only sing, but talk straight from the heart about love and death, the everyday as well as the inexplicable. These poems accomplish that rare feat of weaving a spell from the first to last page that causes everything else to fall away. When she writes, 'In this corner of the desert, she has already died. I pick up her broken mask, promise to glue it together again,' the reader is swept up on a quest to give voice to those unable to speak. It is this fearless desire to tell the truth that makes the poems in In the Company of Spirits matter." -Devreaux Baker, winner of the 2011 PEN Oakland award for Red Willow People