Three poets' performances at Poetry Festival

Listening to Javier Zamora sing one of his poems at Maple Hall to a Meringue beat during this month’s Skagit River Poetry Festival, you would be surprised to learn he had traveled more than 3,000 miles on foot, by bus and boat, across rivers, deserts, through barbed fences to reunite with his parents. At nine years old. Solito. Alone.

Two months of travel, abandoned by his “coyote,” held at gunpoint by a farmer while gulping water from a hose after crossing the Sonora desert, peeing orange, living in cages, his backpack of clean clothes, toothbrush and water stolen, arrested by La Migra, he reunites, finally, with his mom and dad whom he has not seen for five years. They said he smelled of “… piss, shit, sweat, a nasty stench.” They can still smell it.

Of the fifty or sixty migrants he traveled with, only he and the familia of four they crafted out of complete strangers made it across to safety. He fears the others perished in the desert.

But that is not the crux of his memoir, titled “Solita.” It is a journey of love. Love of familia. A familia of complete strangers who chose to care for him, protect him, give him food and water and carry him on their backs when he was too exhausted and dehydrated to walk in the desert furnace. And his birth familia tambíen, reunited after fleeing civil war in El Salvador years before.

Written in the voice of his nine-year old self, in powerful prose, his memoir, long overdue, reflects the lives of millions.

“I was tired of reading news articles about immigrants written by non-immigrants. I heard a poem by Pablo Neruda and began writing poetry.”

Zamora holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a master’s degree from New York University.

He still suffers from PTSD and survivor’s guilt.

Sasha Taqwseblu La Pointe

Elegant punk, tough, tattooed Sasha Taqwseblu (tock-sha-blue) La Pointe, was one of those people you try not to start at. And fail. Great granddaughter of Upper Skagit Tribal member, linguist and storyteller, Vi Hilbert, La Pointe, wore her history, beauty, pain and joy tight on her skin.

“You write for yourself.” She said, dismissing lessons about “finding your audience.”

La Pointe, a homeless teenager, constantly on the run from one Rez to another, fleeing desperate poverty and child sexual assault, she writes of her lonely isolation, her spirit broken.

Weaving her life’s journey from that spiritual desert to a search of her ancestors along the beaches of the Washington coast to the punk rock scene in Seattle, she has gifted us “Red Paint.”

It’s difficult to read a book through watery eyes.

Lorna Crozier

With sixteen books of poetry and a memoir, colorful, passionate Lorna Crozier is one of Canada’s and the world’s most beloved poets. “Through the Garden” is a memoir of her romance with Patrick Lane, her husband, also an award-winning poet and novelist. Lane was the star and winner of the 2014 Skagit Poetry Festival contest. He died three years ago.

“Through the Garden” intimately portrays their love affair and his last painful years. It is filled with “unflinching honesty and fierce tenderness.”

Of the thousands of poems she could have read to us, two she chose stand out: “My Last Erotic Poem,” – a poem Patrick begged her not to read in public – and “For My Mother” from her poems about inflicting curses on people, which she read with eyes-a-sparkle.

Crozier is head chair of the writing department at the

University of Victoria and an Officer of the Order of Canada.