Hallelujah Anyhow

A debut collection of lovingly attentive poems about life in kinship with the land and cohabitants in little known corners of Mexico.

Rural Mexico is practically a co-author of Hallelujah Anyhow, a debut collection that is quietly observant and raw, in which gritty reality lives side by side with delights and transcendence. López Smith pulls on the threads that bind everyone and everything together, whether it be migrants on the borderlands, the majestic wilds or her own small farm. This poetic offering sees the sacred and relational in everything—with sleeves rolled up and dirt under the fingernails—and embraces a tender caregiving toward the land, the creatures, children and community. With gratitude in one hand and a broken heart in the other, these poems are suffused with daily miracles and loving attention to both the horror and the grace of being alive.

“Lisa López Smith’s Hallelujah Anyhow arrives as a mature, singular voice honed over many nations; a discerning eye cast over the wreckage of the North American dream. Mothering, husbandry, environmental and social devastation, human lament; these are poems that stand up and look the ogre of contemporary ideals dead in the eye, calling out its monstrosity. But they are also poems that seek beauty, solidarity and peace in the margins of the unspeakable.”

“With lyrical precision and keen observation, López Smith’s collection affirms poetry’s power to witness both the natural world and ourselves within it.”