In Soul of Black Stone: Echoes of Islands, Shadows of Time, Lara Gularte gathers the tides of memory, migration, ancestry, and longing into a poetry collection of rare emotional and lyrical power. Moving between the volcanic landscapes of the Azores and the sunburnt valleys of California, these poems inhabit the fragile space where diaspora becomes inheritance and memory becomes survival. Gularte writes with elemental force—her imagery filled with basalt shores, ghostly ancestors, whale songs, church bells, wind, saltwater, and the persistent ache of saudade. Her poems do not merely remember the Azores; they resurrect them, carrying their mists, rituals, and silences across oceans and generations.

At once intimate and mythic, Soul of Black Stone is a meditation on exile, womanhood, labor, faith, ecological belonging, and the sacred persistence of family memory. Descended from Azorean immigrants, Gularte transforms oral histories, ancestral fragments, and landscapes of migration into luminous acts of poetic witness. Her language moves fluidly between realism and dream, between the historical and the spiritual, creating a world where the dead speak through rivers, stones breathe with memory, and the sea itself becomes an archive of human longing. This is a book that will resonate deeply with readers of diasporic literature, eco-poetry, feminist poetics, and anyone who has ever searched for home across distance and time. In Lara Gularte’s hands, poetry becomes both compass and sanctuary—a way of carrying entire islands within the soul.

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14 dollars, including shipping and handling–checks made out to Institute Azorean-American Studies -request by mail:

Bruma Publications-Diniz Borges 1418 Clarete Avenue-Tulare, CA 93274