Peach Pit Corazón
A Judith Ortiz Cofer Reader
Edited by Emeritus Professor Rafael Ocasio to reflect his mentor’s literary evolution and multitudinous cultural contributions, Peach Pit Corazón is an invaluable, scintillating collection of Georgia Rican writer Judith Ortiz Cofer’s work.
Ortiz Cofer, beloved by her students across her years of teaching at the University of Georgia, is presented here as a keen cultural historian and an activist whose oeuvre reflected her geographically split childhood and feelings of displacement. The book includes a variety of her essays, selections from her autofiction, warm short stories, and recastings of Puerto Rican fables.
Multiple protagonists in Ortiz Cofer’s Paterson, New Jersey-set stories live in El Building, where former island residents congregate, forming a barrio in miniature that makes the world around them feel a bit less gray. One, in mourning for her husband, thinks back on how they met; she is moved when his premature death leaves their whole community grieving. Another resident, bereft after the losses of her husband and son, declares that she has nothing left; she begins giving her possessions away, foreshadowing doom that her neighbors politely ignore.
Ortiz Cofer’s essays sift through literature, history, and challenging personal experiences to form an intersectional feminist rubric. These values are reflected across the book’s forms: in one tale, a nun teaches her student to see with her “whole self, not just with [her] eyes,” slipping library books to her each class and beginning her “long affair with the word”; in another, a profiled woman, made the subject of a portly beauty store manager’s baseless ire, leaves “several strands of coarse black hair … shaped into a question mark” on his counter. In a fable, a girl has a brilliant, lifesaving idea while “mixing the starshine.”
Throughout, the selected work exemplifies añoranza, or an “overwhelming yearning for something left behind.” Ortiz Cofer’s lines, with their intermingled Spanish and English terms, pulse with understated beauty and profound human observations, as of a grandmother discovering “the kind of joy that can only be achieved by living according to the dictates of one’s own heart,” and of a widower whose “grief had turned him inside out.” Indeed, Peach Pit Corazón bursts with wisdom, its pages welcoming and absorbing whether its readers are encountering Ortiz Cofer for the first time or are returning home.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
