Sofía - Poems
La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, NM, 1999
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Bilingual edition—written in English and translated into Spanish by Claire Joysmith and Arturo Salinas

Joan Logghe’s series of thirty poems works like a small novel to reveal the life of an Hispanic woman with a Sephardic Jewish background. The hidden or “crypto” Jews of New Mexico were originally among those forced into exile at the time of the Spanish Inquisition and became early settlers in the Southwest. These poems “came” to the author, in the voice of persona over a period of fifteen years, from that place where inspiration and collective memory converge. The series draws on stories and lives of actual women, the author’s own life in the Española Valley, and is dedicated to the Goddess of Wisdom alive in every woman.

This book received a Money for Women/Barbara Deming Grant Memorial Fund grant for the translations into Spanish.