Flamenco Hips and Red Mud Feet

Duality is at the center of Flamenco Hips and Red Mud Feet, a striking collection of poems both intimate and grand. The poet, Dixie Salazar, has spent a lifetime forging her own identity out of two cultures: ""On one side was my father's world: Spanish speaking from las montanas. On the other side was my mother's world: a deep Southern drawl wafting from the magnolia and chinaberry trees."" As her poems reveal, she is a product of both cultures but not completely at home in either one. In the two sections of the book--""Inside"" and ""Outside""--parallelism and symmetry interact with themes both public and private. Flamenco Hips and Red Mud Feet presents thirty-nine poems in free verse and traditional poetic forms, especially the sonnet and adaptations of the sonnet. The sonnet--usually consisting of the octet (eight lines) that sets up the main idea of the poem and the sestet (six lines) that resolves, answers or completes the poem--is a natural form for a poet whose identity is divided. Double sonnets and ""double-linked sonnets doubled"" reflect the duality the poet feels inside her skin. And the poems written to and for a ""lost sister"" reinforce the theme. Throughout this provocative book, Salazar navigates the alienation of her cultural in-between-ness. By the end, she appears to become more comfortable with her status of ""outsider,"" deciding that she doesn't need to give in to pressures to pick a side or to accept others' ideas of where her own ""borders"" begin or end.