Amelia Díaz Ettinger
Learning to Love a Western Sky

Learning to Love a Western Sky is a reflection of the assimilation of the immigrant into the host landscape. It is the transition from nostalgia to integration and the review of aging, loving, and betrayal in this foreign home.

Cover design: Beth Ford
ISBN: 978-1-950404-04-9
Paperback: $16
Publication date: September 1, 2020

Born in Mexico and raised in Puerto Rico, Amelia Díaz Ettinger writes poems that reflect the struggle with identity often found in immigrants. She began writing poetry at age three, dictating poems out loud to the adults in her life who wrote them down for her. Ettinger has continued writing poems and short stories throughout her life, while working as a high school science teacher. In 2015, her first book of poetry, Speaking at a Time, was published by Redbat books. Ettinger lives in Summerville, Oregon.

Praise for Learning to Love a Western Sky

"Learning to Love a Western Sky ranges widely from Ettinger's home in the Grande Ronde, to her beloved patria Puerto Rico, in poems of love and sorrow, aging and memory, art and death, with compassion always at the core. This is a poet with a particular gift for surprising rhythms and patterns of sound, and she brings to each poem, most impressively, an individual, distinctive voice. These are wonderful, if sometimes troubling poems—exactly what I come to poetry for."

—Molly Gloss, award-winning author of The Hearts of Horses 

"These poems sing a duet of longing—love for a Puerto Rico far away and long ago, and devotion to the American West here and now. We would be poorer without such witness to both homelands, here in conversation through poetry. The rich double consciousness of Amelia Ettinger travels the lyric highway between then and now, there and here. She reminds us to recover the exotic dimensions of memory and savor direct experience now."

—Kim Stafford, author of Wild Honey, Tough Salt

"By turns personal, topical, and erotic, the poems in Learning to Love a Western Sky search for moments of stillness and familiarity in an era of displacements. Like the psalmodist in exile in Babylon, Ettinger is full of grief and longing for her youth in her Caribbean Zion to which she sings her many devotions, aging in a foreign land.

—David Axelrod, author of The Open Hand

Excerpt from Learning to Love a Western Sky

Patria

My dear beloved:

Describe
Patria
Homeland… too formal.
Country… no warmth.
But Patria is
family
food
colorful hands.
I shudder
naming your towns
Lares
Aibonito
Boquerón
y Caguas.
Sí, it is always Caguas.

I long to see your beaches
your red soil
feel your hot breath
against my shoulder
to smell pasteles wrapped in
green hope and
plantain leaves
to kiss my wise old man
and pet your boney dogs.

I long to feel the mildew of the Caribbean
filter the marrow
of cell
cement
and memory
to recall your loudspeakers
shouting
promise
and despair.

I long to feel that languid sun
extreme
suffocating
rapturous
transforming our men
arrogant and loud
with desires beyond 
your narrow width
who dance and drink
love and think
with the intensity of your sky
that limits nothing
who wear guayaberas
and play dominos
and make love
with just a look.

Your mothers and girls
humble and strong
who run time
in heels and steel
making
and marking
keeping you afloat
in the perfume of rightfulness
in full lips that whisper
a future as uncertain as an eyelash
but make you believe
in god and children
and that there is no other
Earth.

Beloved Patria:How is it to be you?
Especially now
when your children flee
when your soil is left behind
in empty lots
that hum 
lost verses
of a mute song in a Caribbean
breeze.

This song of farewell.