Kindling is a collage of prose poetry, poems, essays, performance pieces and memoir, exploring the rich complexity of living in a physical and social body. From 19th century bomba dancers to the environmental causes of epilepsy from eugenics to the Cuban health care system, from the sexuality of the chronically sick and tired, to a broader interpretation of taking back the night, Levins Morales writes with passion and insight, self-revelation and global,historical perspective.

A lifelong feminist and radical, artist and activist, storyteller and historian, Aurora Levins Morales' writing bridges the gap between the intimately personal and the global, between sensual experience and theory.  In Kindling she explores the meanings of sickness and healing, suffering and pleasure, through the story of her own body, of all our bodies, of the body of the planet.  


Picture
Aurora Levins Morales performing "Stroke" for Sins Invalid, April, 2011 ©2011 Richard Downing
 
PictureBody Map by Aurora Levins Morales

















     







"There is no neutral body from which our bodies deviate.  Society has written deep into each strand of tissue of every living person on earth.  What it writes into the heart muscles of five star generals is distinct from what it writes in the pancreatic tissue and intestinal tracts of Black single mothers in Detroit, of Mexicana migrants in Fresno, but no body stands outside the consequences of injustice and inequality."
from "Mountain Moving Day"


“Aurora’s writing is itself alchemy, balancing emotional nuance with rich historical context, simultaneously speaking in an intimate personal voice and for a collective we. She offers us vulnerable, power-filled lyricism that moves the audience to new understandings of their own lives as she claims her body’s pleasures and pain. Her writing moves me like no other.”           Patty Berne, Cofounder and Artistic Director, Sins Invalid


“Medically, ‘kindling’ refers to the way bodies can be sensitized by small, repeated exposures to chemicals or electric shocks.  Aurora’s essays and poems about the human body’s responses to oppression describe both the kindling of disease and of consciousness, fragments of tinder that ignite into a blazing awareness of our bodies as sites of struggle and transformation.”                Casimira Fuentes O’Neill, M.D.