Pura Puta - a poetic memoir by Anna C. Martinez

Pura Puta, the debut collection from slam champion Anna C. Martinez, tells the many stories of Woman—sensual, erotic, visceral, tragic, and always, always powerful—through Martinez’s own life and the other women in her family in Los Angeles and northern New Mexico. The pieces dance with the unmistakable cadence of performance poetry and spring forth both tears and exuberance. Nearly nothing in this book is easy, because her life has not been easy either. But triumph counters trauma, and the poems return always to an eternal freedom, hard-earned through all the stages of her life. These are stories that need heard, from a poet who demands your full heart.

Both the paperback bookstore edition and the Casa Urraca exclusive hardcover edition are printed on 50# creme paper with a matte laminate cover. 248 pages.

Anna C. Martinez is a slam/performance/ competitive poet and civil rights attorney. She has held titles as ABQ Chicano/a City Slam Champ, XXX Haiku City Champ, and 2019 City Slam Champ for team Mindwell Slam. She is also on the board of directors for Burque Revolt Poetry Slam. She lives in Albuquerque.

Advance praise for Pura Puta:

“Powerful and brave, Anna C. Martinez’s poetic memoir, Pura Puta, pulses with the electricity of a million beating hearts. Moving between the visceral and delicate, these poems are healing and transformative. What a badass Chicana poet.” 

–Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Woman of Light
and American Book Award winner Sabrina & Corina

“This collection of poems by Anna Martinez achieves, on so many levels, what so many other practitioners are in hot pursuit of—mainly, poems sourced from the deepest refuges of the heart and soul that spill over the page like ancient tribal love songs, war songs, heroic in their tone and righteous in their claims, with a fluid style that’s easy to read and challenging only in its idea to shatter boring convention so many poets rely on in fear of criticism—she is fearless, and every high school teacher needs to study these in class, college kids need to recite these in their reading circles and book clubs—go after your education, these poems will incite your intelligence, wake it up, and open your eyes as well as your heart!”

–Jimmy Santiago Baca, author of A Place to Stand
and When I Walk Through That Door, I Am

“Here is a poetry collection concocted with electric words, stories of storm, rage, and infinite faith. Martinez’s poetry is a prayer without repentance and she allows truth to be her ultimate spiritual guide. She weaves a poetic quilt stitched with her own special kind of medicine, which is to say, they are pieced together with the fabric of her ululating personal histories, traumas, and triumphs. It is an urgent, sharp collection of elegies to be read aloud and in the quietude of one’s most intimate spaces. Pura Puta is both subtly soft and raucously loud as a deafening bomb. This collection will shout, sing, soothe, and assail your senses in the best possible way. Martinez does not disappoint. Prepare yourselves, readers, for a most fantastic literary journey.”

–Jessica Helen Lopez, author of The Blood Poems
and City of Albuquerque Poet Laureate Emerita

“Martinez has crafted a beautiful collection full of magic found within the rough edges of the concrete reality she paints with her pen. Stories of family, perseverance, of the incredible strength of women across the vast expanse of this timeline. A portrait of her own strength to speak uncomfortable truths poetically to the patriarchy, mixed with the light glimmer of hope that can only be found in the sky of a northern New Mexico night. I was changed by this reading; it is a journey I would recommend to anyone with a beating heart.”

–Dylan Collins, author of In Our Hearts
Slowly Built a Thunder