Gawdzilla
Hardcover edition
Publication: July 2022
“Achingly beautiful and specific, lovingly condensed, and uncannily complex, Gawdzilla by award-winning author Judy Juanita will break your heart as it did mine, as it offers you the gift of coming away restored. Juanita's truth-telling about the United States' foundational racism, violence, inequities, and precarities is layer-on-layer of living, breathing loyalty to personal experience and wisdom. I last felt this way reading Lucille Clifton and Nikki Giovanni.”
—Carmen Acevedo Butcher
Publication: July 2022
Gawdzilla is a series of poems that examine race, marriage, family, abortion, and social changes since 1954 when Godzilla, the horror movie, and the Supreme Court ruling on integration, Brown v. Bd. of Ed, Topeka, Ks., occurred. Like the movie monster that resurrects in movie after movie, systemic societal evils appear dormant while continuing to enormously impact daily lives.
for adult readers
Livingston Press, 2022
ISBN-13 (hardcover): 978-1-60489-319-9
ISBN-13 (trade paperback): 978-1-60489-318-2
ISBN-13 (e-book): 978-1-60489-320-5
