Puro Amor
​Sandra Cisneros

Houses matter to Sandra Cisneros. She describes a "house with windows so small they look like they're holding their breaths" in her debut The House on Mango Street, beloved eyes "like little houses" in her novel Caramelo, and she writes of her lifelong quest to find autonomy in her essay collection, A House of My Own.  Cisneros's houses are sacrosanct spaces, where art, entwined with life, takes root and flourishes.
 
In Puro Amor, Cisneros imagines Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's Coyoacán Casa Azul in brushstroke sentences that are ornate, exuberant, and precise, and an elliptical narrative that moves rapidly through the years, shaped by el corazón. Cisneros enters the secret rooms of Casa Azul, conjuring the memories that color Kahlo's mind as she declines: the rich mango colors of the walls, her husband comforting her or betraying her, the tilted ears of a dog, bent to her like "a radiant sunflower." Acts of service fill Kahlo's days in the blue house. Making art falls beside making lunch for her husband, braiding her hair, or walking with her dogs. 

Kahlo paints alone, and while loving, compromising, and suffering. Here, too, is a well of silence and simple reciprocity that waters the seeds of Kahlo's work; Cisneros captures love's reflection in the soft eyes of Kahlo's animalitos. Cisneros's line drawing illustrations are, like her words, both rich and spare. Shaggy movement suggested by a pencil squiggle, a kissable tenderness in the upturned snout of a hound. This tiny book is a tesoro, a bright, elegant flower.

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, whose work explores the lives of the working-class. Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, several honorary doctorates and book awards nationally and internationally, and most recently Chicago’s Fifth Star Award, the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the National Medal of the Arts, awarded to her by President Obama in 2016. The House on Mango Street has sold over five million copies, been translated into over twenty languages.

Puro Amor is publication by Sarabande Books. Click here to purchase.
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Reviewed by
Gina Balibrera
​​8/22/2019

Gina Balibrera earned an MFA in Prose from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers' Program, where she was also a Zell Postgraduate Fellow. She has been awarded grants from the Gould Center, the Rackham Institute, a Tyson Award, the Aura Estrada Prize, and the Under Volcano Cisneros Fellowship for her fiction. Her work appears in the Boston Review, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Wandering Song, an anthology of writing of the Central American diaspora. 

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