Legalize My Mother: A Collection of Poems, Prayers, and Chants by Manya Yana Herrera

Legalize My Mother: A Collection of Poems, Prayers, and Chants is a call to action in the form of an altar - a collection that includes prose poems, portrait poems, fragments, lyric poems, and chants. This volume explores in-betweenness, the violence of whiteness, shame, Indigeneity, motherhood, queerness, divine femininity, self-determination, healing and prayer. It is not divided into sections, but works as a continuous narrative that moves through times of violence, sensuality, and healing.

Legalize My Mother is the tenacious search for the mother creature. Deranged at times, half-eaten, but always curious and full of wonder, relentlessly expanding. Filling the body, tearing the body apart. It is generative.

How does a mother's touch offer your life more depth or swift access to the spiritual? How does your mother's touch of care complicate your life? How do we, as first-generation Mexican-American daughters, preserve the magic and medicine of our mothers, while facing and healing from the nuances of intergenerational trauma?

This book celebrates a kind of divine sexuality arising from a hyper-sensual feminine presence of being. As a Latina/indigenous woman, as a mother, artist, lover, activist beating back on the onslaught of American racism and misogyny, Manya Yana Herrera turns to sensuality as a connective tissue: the love within the fight.

Using the aesthetic of an altar, Herrera organizes each piece ceremoniously, an experience motivated by texture and sensuality. This has materialized in unexpected ways, the placement of a single line on the page; a slightly damaged feather alongside a figure of a red-mouthed jaguar. Fierce and creature-like or abrupt like a decaying tooth, a hardened umbilical cord, a severed dreadlock. Each piece represents stages of growth, the altar being a metaphor for the personal work that is necessary in order to know ourselves outside of the distress of oppression. It reads sharp like a machete and nurtures like the medicine of yerbas.

PUBLISHED BY

Legalize My Mother: A Collection of Poems, Prayers, and Chants published by Riot of Roses Publishing House
Legalize My Mother: A Collection of Poems, Prayers, and Chants by Manya Yana Herrera

AVAILABLE FROM

Legalize My Mother: A Collection of Poems, Prayers, and Chants available from Riot of Roses Publishing House
Legalize My Mother: A Collection of Poems, Prayers, and Chants available from Rebel Hearts Books
Legalize My Mother: A Collection of Poems, Prayers, and Chants available from Bloomsbury Books
Legalize My Mother: A Collection of Poems, Prayers, and Chants available from Amazon
Legalize My Mother: A Collection of Poems, Prayers, and Chants available from Barnes & Noble

ADVANCE PRAISE

Manya reaches into the void for the goddess’ heart and finds the codex of human struggle, triumph and exultation. In a language fractured and defiant, she plumbs the depths of personal womanhood with daredevil vision.

— Octavio Solis, Playwright and Author of Retablos

Legalize My Mother is a book of powers—special powers, rediscovered and ancient powers, speaking the language of the river serpent, that kind of power.

Reading it is like looking into a vein and finding a kaleidoscope, being drawn into the shifting reflections of blood, and witnessing the translation of that radiance into revolution. "The sensuality of the world pulsed in my veins like sunshine," Manya Yana Herrera writes. I have read this book many times, and each time has felt like returning to the most extraordinary altar-wild-edged and beautiful, voluminous yet intimate, immediate yet everlasting.

— Brandon Shimoda, Poet and Writer, Author of The Afterlife is Letting Go and Hydra Medusa

Legalize my Mother revels in sass, rhythm and movement. The lush, sensual language is a refuge from liminality.

— Alma Rosa Alvarez, Poet and Professor of Literature, Co-author of Promised Fruit and Water's Edge

Legalize My Mother by Manya Yana Herrera — a self-proclaimed Loud-Mouthed Half-Breed Mexican Bitch" whose "hoops have always been this big, this gold, this fearless" - will seduce and bewitch you. A decolonial reclamation of divine femininity and sensuality, her spells and chants build momentum, unapologetic and fierce. Dazzling with ancestral light, the collection simmers with epazote, cinnamon, cardamom, and other yerbas and spices. As the author writes,

"Yes, I can be a liberated Xicana and make tortillas." Her words-electrifying, hypnotic, medicinal-will awaken your senses and linger on your tongue long after you've devoured them, leaving you hungry for more. This book will empower and heal you.

— Victoria Bañales, 2025-2027 Watsonville Poet Laureate & Author of The Sun Will Not Harm You by Day, Nor the Moon by Night

In this collection, Manya Herrera stirs language with the precision of an alchemist, weaving golden threads from the light of Huitzilopochtli (Aztec Sun God) and the glimmers and sparks of a life deeply lived, delivering a poetic tapestry, brilliant in its account - a true gem.

— Alixa Garcia, Award-winning Poet, Author, Community Organizer, and Creator of Imaginal Ancestral Blueprinting

Manya Yana Herrera

MANYA YANA HERRARA

Manya Yana Herrera is a Xicana poet, writer, visual artist, restaurateur, and mother creature. She has been published in Ofrenda Magazine, We’Moon, & The Jefferson Journal. She is the author of two chapbooks, Blue Corn, Mixed Masa, and the Occasional Magic Trick and A look of defiance. Radiant. She was a recipient of the 2022 Haines & Friends Visual Arts Grant for her mixed-media art installation; Latina Geniuses are Everywhere. Manya received her MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art.