FROM FORMER CALIFORNIA POET LAUREATE AL YOUNG:

"In its passionate embrace of sensuality and society, the poetry of La Tigresa (Dona Nieto) purrs and growls, but rarely meows. This wayward, sometimes reckless writer knows what she's doing as she plugs touch back into every page -- along with voice, heart, gut, and every other sense.

Ardent and strident, spiritual and casual by turns, La Tigresa celebrates the body electric and the body politic with sheer pleasure, devotion, intuition and wit. In her stand-up presence, under her spell, you smile, recognizing the underlying question that drives these poems in which corporate and human agendas collide.

"Your money or your life?" a mugger once asked radio comedian Jack Benny. "I'm thinking, I'm thinking!" was Benny's slow response. Playfully, meaningfully, La Tigresa's poetry rejoins feeling with thought in a vernacular lyricism that is anything but cool, complacent or calming."
-- Al Young, California Poet Laureate Emeritus

About Al Young:
In 2005, Al Young was appointed Poet Laureate of California. His other honors include Wallace Stegner, Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the PEN-Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction, the PEN-USA Award for Non-Fiction, two American Book Awards, two Pushcart Prizes, two New York Times Notable Book of the year citations, and more.

FROM FORMER SAN FRANCISCO POET LAUREATE JACK HIRSCHMAN:

“…what gives this book of La Tigresa (Dona Nieto) its real power of adventure comes…with the genuine relationship the Tigress has with nature’s gifts: with insects, rocks and the moon. I’ve never read a poet…who could evoke so much from an encounter with a butterfly! Yes, it is sexual energy that propels her forward in words in search of realizing the juiciness of this life in herself and others. But human nature, that great teacher of the human animal, guides that propulsion to the affirmation of the wide range of lovers – including even a butterfly – that she provides for everyone with a charm that is unforgettable.”
--Jack Hirschman, San Francisco Poet Laureate Emeritus

About Jack Hirschman:
Jack Hirschman, an internationally acclaimed poet, translator, essayist, scholar and humanistic activist, has published over 100 books of poetry and essays. In 2006, Hirschman was appointed Poet Laureate of San Francisco. He won the Antonio Vacaro Prize for Poetry in Paris in 2005.

FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO AND SACRAMENTO REVIEW OF BOOKS:

"A return to pastoral, naturalist poetry, Dona Nieto takes reign with NAKED SACRED EARTH POEMS. Romanticizing the idyllic mother earth with heightened sensibility, Nieto deconstructs the notion of industrialization and commercialized mass production as such are properties of urbanization because purity lies in the raw splendor of openness: “Peel back the layers of what you call progress—/ I am so much more beautiful naked than clothed” (I Am the Goddess). Using vegetation and forestation as forms of foreplay, the poet takes license in seducing the reader with her double entendres: “Soft green moss/ on the velvet loveseat of a fallen tree trunk” (Biosexual). Nieto’s bluntness with language and assertive action to describe a frivolous and fruitful sexuality renders a woman’s manifesto: a feminist spirit where social norms and means of propriety are ever so gingerly replaced with independent and self-sufficient matriarchal figures.

This poetry anthology is a bold and ambitious collection that does not shy away from rhetorical and /or honest assumptions of gender roles, relationship qualms, issues about mortality and decay “the moment we dissolve in vulnerability” (Poem for Sis) and observes the analogies of abandonment in the environment to be as livid as a body no longer inhabited by wildness of love or animalistic desire."

-Reviewed by Erienne Rojas

http://www.sanfranciscobookreview.com/poetry-short-stories/naked-sacred-earth-poems/