The University of Arizona Press
City of Eves
Poems
Paperback ($18.00), Ebook ($18.00)
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In City of Eves, Silvia Bonilla evokes the lives and longing of three young women who suspect the wider world is a ship on the verge of departure—and who are determined not to be stranded on shore.
Sonia and her two best friends grow up on the urban coast of Ecuador, sharing cigarettes, school uniforms, and a determination to overcome their circumstances even if the price to pay is exile. Full of fantasies and curiosity, the friends navigate hunger at home, absent parents, and religious pressures as they help each other through the pleasures and traumas of adolescence. As their desire for something greater changes from dreams into actions, they pursue escape routes that hover between choice and compulsion: forced marriages, early widowhood, and a death-haunted migration to the United States. Even in the throes of escape, the constraints of their reality always lie waiting.
Subtle and unsparing, Bonilla’s lyrical poems capture the wild inner horizons and vivid embodiment of youth as it shades into the reflective poignance of maturity marked by disappointment, compromise, and loss. Despite this, it is memories of deep friendship, bonded through shared understanding and aspiration, that lingers. Looking back on her life, Sonia recalls the courage and vitality of girls determined to shape their own futures: “We lifted Coca-Cola bottles to the / opened granadilla of our mouths.”
Sonia and her two best friends grow up on the urban coast of Ecuador, sharing cigarettes, school uniforms, and a determination to overcome their circumstances even if the price to pay is exile. Full of fantasies and curiosity, the friends navigate hunger at home, absent parents, and religious pressures as they help each other through the pleasures and traumas of adolescence. As their desire for something greater changes from dreams into actions, they pursue escape routes that hover between choice and compulsion: forced marriages, early widowhood, and a death-haunted migration to the United States. Even in the throes of escape, the constraints of their reality always lie waiting.
Subtle and unsparing, Bonilla’s lyrical poems capture the wild inner horizons and vivid embodiment of youth as it shades into the reflective poignance of maturity marked by disappointment, compromise, and loss. Despite this, it is memories of deep friendship, bonded through shared understanding and aspiration, that lingers. Looking back on her life, Sonia recalls the courage and vitality of girls determined to shape their own futures: “We lifted Coca-Cola bottles to the / opened granadilla of our mouths.”
“Silvia Bonilla's City of Eves is a book of haunting precision and simmering brilliance. Spare and atmospheric, these poems investigate lovers, curses, hunger, possibility, poverty, migration, identity, transformation, and stasis. We meet parents, then meet children, then contemplate God. Narratives run together incisively; they split and then reconvene. One poem references the ‘shivering act / of happiness’; another announces, ‘I came loose from my past.’ Bonilla's keen powers of observation, sense, and sound are just what we need right now.”—Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing
"City of Eves is a keen exploration of womanhood, culture, and identity. The collection sings deep truths and elicits 'walking dreams' with which to consider the Eves we’ve known and carried."—Gloria Muñoz, author of Danzirly
"Silvia Bonilla’s City of Eves makes visceral the precarity and hardship that accompanies immigration from South America to the United States where poverty and its hungers, accompanied by the intersections of race and gender, remains a violence."—Brenda Cárdenas, author of Trace
"Silvia Bonilla’s language is furiously alive, rippling with startling imagery. The linguistic intensity enacts the slippages and beauty of belonging—Sonia and her friends live in a whirlwind of poverty, in the din of gender norms. Bonilla reveals the necessity of migration but also sets nostalgia in motion. Interiority is vividly felt: it’s luminous, barbed. Bonilla’s debut is brilliant, singular."—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
“City of Eves is a stunning, lyrical meditation of self, history, human relation and world. Photo albums give way to questions of God. Love pervades every turn. We see the complexity of self and identity; the intergenerational gaze; landscapes, both past and present. Everywhere is this poignant question put to human ache: ‘I wanted the world to speak,’ Bonilla writes, ‘but it was just me and my thoughts, and iron pressing the chest.’”—Bianca Stone, author of What is Otherwise Infinite
"City of Eves is a keen exploration of womanhood, culture, and identity. The collection sings deep truths and elicits 'walking dreams' with which to consider the Eves we’ve known and carried."—Gloria Muñoz, author of Danzirly
"Silvia Bonilla’s City of Eves makes visceral the precarity and hardship that accompanies immigration from South America to the United States where poverty and its hungers, accompanied by the intersections of race and gender, remains a violence."—Brenda Cárdenas, author of Trace
"Silvia Bonilla’s language is furiously alive, rippling with startling imagery. The linguistic intensity enacts the slippages and beauty of belonging—Sonia and her friends live in a whirlwind of poverty, in the din of gender norms. Bonilla reveals the necessity of migration but also sets nostalgia in motion. Interiority is vividly felt: it’s luminous, barbed. Bonilla’s debut is brilliant, singular."—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
“City of Eves is a stunning, lyrical meditation of self, history, human relation and world. Photo albums give way to questions of God. Love pervades every turn. We see the complexity of self and identity; the intergenerational gaze; landscapes, both past and present. Everywhere is this poignant question put to human ache: ‘I wanted the world to speak,’ Bonilla writes, ‘but it was just me and my thoughts, and iron pressing the chest.’”—Bianca Stone, author of What is Otherwise Infinite
100 Pages
7 x 9 x 0
Published: February 2026Paperback ISBN: 9780816555772
Published: February 2026Ebook ISBN: 9780816555789