Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography
Read an excerpt of Women Surrounded by Water in Electric Literature
Listen to Patricia Coral read from Women Surrounded by Water in Poets & Writers
Patricia Coral reads from Women Surrounded by Water in Debutiful
Watch Patricia Coral’s book talk and reading at Politics and Prose
“With all the garbage talk from 45 about the beautiful island of Puerto Rico, it’s imperative to learn the truth about it from the people themselves. This immersive debut memoir is full of robust imagery and lyrical stories of one family of Puerto Rican women.” —Karla J. Strand, Ms.
“Puerto Rican poet Coral's haunting, lyrical memoir will captivate readers drawn to raw, introspective storytelling.…With vivid imagery and emotional depth, Coral’s narrative becomes a poignant meditation on how family history and place shape identity.” —Roxane Pico-Lenz, Booklist
“Women Surrounded by Water is a memoir-song-ode-manifesto-rosary to the Puerto Rican women of a family with ghosts for men. In the colonial context of the archipelago’s countryside, the men look to the national culture for identity and come away broken, while the women look to tradition, love, and religion to escape the guilt of leaving men who must be left. It is a story of betrayals, of oneself and others, and of the hungers of the heart such struggles leave behind. Coral has contained my very history, my heartbreak, along with her own.” —Anjanette Delgado, author of The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho
“Every time I read this memoir, it breaks my heart, yet by the time I finish, my heart feels whole again. These lives and losses leap off the page. Patricia Coral’s language is alternately lyrical and lush, bold and unsparing, always with an awareness of history’s whetted edge. A stunning debut.” —Sandra Beasley, author of Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life
“A beautiful and intimate memoir with a lot of heart.” —Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful
“Women Surrounded by Water centers on the silenced history of Puerto Rican women and what writer Anjannette Delgado calls ‘our sexile.’ Colonization, patriarchy, and family tie women to the land differently than they tie men to it. Revisiting the history of her ancestras, Patricia Coral tells her own story while also giving voice to the experiences of three generations of women. Using memory and form to decolonize her storytelling, she invites us to ‘senti-pensar’ with her the process of becoming a woman writer, a Latina whose voice can shape the fragmented view we have of Puerto Rico.” —Mayra Santos-Febres
“Patricia Coral has composed a work so intimate, so faithful a translation of emotion and experience, that it is difficult to call this collection a memoir when it is also poetry and family album and historical testament. But it is memoir in the most urgent sense: with unmatched concision, honest remembrance, and care, the author leads her readers through the heretofore terrifying, now vivifying, waters of life.” —David Keplinger, author of Ice and Another City
Growing up in Puerto Rico, Patricia Coral was surrounded by women who fought for their needs amid the demands of domesticity and who were dismissed and judged when they rejected any predetermined paths on an island that itself has never been free. At age twenty-five, she married her first love, a green-eyed musician whose internal storms drove Coral to slowly realize that the marriage must end. Faced with disillusionment—with her husband, with the patriarchal expectations that surrounded her like the Caribbean Sea, and with the limited options available to her—she leaves, only for Hurricane Maria to wrench her heart homeward.
Coral evokes the beauty, love, and language of her family and of Puerto Rico as well as the pain of yearning for more. Tastes, colors, and the dreamlike lushness of childhood memories infuse this mournful and propulsive memoir of personal and natural disasters—and the self-discovery made possible only when we choose what to leave behind.
Patricia Coral is a bilingual Puerto Rican writer. She holds an MFA in creative writing from American University, where she received the Myra Sklarew Award and where she was Editor in Chief of FOLIO Coral writes creative nonfiction and poetry, but frequently her words find their home in between. The former events director for Politics and Prose Bookstore, she has contributed to numerous literary magazines.
Contents
Trigger Warning
Proyectos Domésticos: Land
The Women Who Test the Waters
Marriage Addictions I
A Prayer for Mercy
Don’t Leave Him Alone
Marriage Addictions II
A Prayer for Miracles
Bisabuela Minia
The Women in the Kitchen
A Prayer for the Ones Who Lost All
Domestic Romance
The Women I Grew Up With
Marriage Addictions III
A Hopeless Prayer
Madera Mala
The Untamed Women
A Prayer for Acceptance
Abuela Mery Before Us
Aislamientos: Shore
uno: exiles
The Dual or Multiple
Prayers for the Ones Who Emigrate
Diasporic Essay I
Diasporic Essay II
Diasporic Essay III
Diasporic Essay IV
A Prayer for the One Who Doesn’t Return
The Women Who Are Not the One
La Isla
dos: storms
The Storms Hit
Broken House
Ruta Panorámica
The One Who Sends Boxes
The Women Who Survive Hurricanes
Hurricane Memorials
tres: burials
Boxes to Carry
The Women Who Are Wrapped in Sheets
Hurricane María Antonia
Camino a Casa: Ocean
After the Three Longest Minutes
Abuela Geo
Cooking Lessons
After the Hurricane
Author’s Pic
The One Who Learns to Swim in the Ocean
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Works Referenced
