Learning to Love a Western Sky

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. Ettinger's second book of poetry reflects 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.

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

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

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