In this beautiful ode to the female body, María Mínguez Arias takes us on a journey with both prose and poetry as our guides, through the intimate terrain of illness and healing, the complex emotions of motherhood, and the struggle to claim her body and her queerness as her own. A brilliant and unabashedly feminist tour de force for these painful and confusing times.- Anne Raeff, author of Only the River

After reading this personal collection of essays, I started to tremble, to allow myself to touch parts of my experiences too painful to be acknowledged. Mínguez Arias gave me the tools to freely inhabit my own self and name the monsters (i.e. misogyny, religion, Dominican and American patriarchal societies, education systems and politics that inhibit education, fear, survival, etc.). This text provided me with the words to name and to love myself vociferously.- Kianny N. Antigua, author of Bestezuelas and translator of Dominicana

There are those who say that mothering is giving our children the words they don't yet have. But what happens when the words to name ourselves don't exist-when they were not given to us by our own mothers? Naming the Body is an inquiry into personal and collective memory. Mínguez Arias rereads her own past through the light of new language-now that she can call things by their name. If, as Voloshinov said, language is the arena of class struggle, then the pages in this book become a territory that subverts, a subversive cartography.-Mariana Graciano, author of The Air

In Naming the Body María Mínguez Arias returns to the corporeal to explore the foundational memories and bodily experiences that shape her as a queer, migrant woman, mother, daughter, lover, and writer. This journey requires imagination and the will to surrender as both, the body and its language, can only be reached through approximations. She invites us to imagine a world in which we look within to allow the body to articulate the ache, the pleasure, the fear, and the tremors that come with being alive. -Kadiri Vaquer Fernández, author of Pero venías tú, and translator of All That Was Future / Todo lo qua due futuro