Offerings to a Tumbled Temple by Leticia Urieta is an arresting, lyrical meditation on illness, embodiment, loss, and devotion. In this stunning poetry collection, Urieta transforms the lived experience of chronic pain and healing into ritual, language, and myth. The body-both sacred and wounded-becomes the site of prayer and reckoning. Through altars built of blood, memory, and tenderness, these poems offer not only lamentation but also fierce reclamation: the body as temple, tumbled yet enduring.
Structured as a series of offerings, invocations, and spells, the collection moves through landscapes of grief, motherhood, and survival. In poems like "Altar," "A Year of Offerings to the Body," and "The Graveyard of Good Health," the speaker communes with ancestors, lost pregnancies, and the intimate pain of chronic illness. Urieta's language is both sacred and visceral-obsidian blades, jars of trapped words, and the pulse of a beating heart blur the boundaries between spiritual and corporeal worlds. Each poem becomes a form of ceremony, an act of remembering, of rebuilding faith in a body that has endured.