Purple Ink Press is pleased to publish this remarkable book.
$9.95 offered at $8.95
Publisher’s Note:
When I saw this manuscript come in, it was an instant yes. This is a special book and exactly what we are looking for.
Leticia Urieta’s Offerings to a Tumbled Temple is simply stunning. It is both hymn and prayer. In this collection, the body is rendered as altar and prayer. Urieta writes with a lyric fire that transforms suffering into ceremony, reclaiming pain as proof of endurance. Her pages pulse with the ache and resilience of living inside a body that remembers, forgives, and sings.
Offerings to a Tumbled Temple do not simply speak—it blesses.
—Yael Valencia Aldana, Editor in Chief, Purple Ink Press
author of Black Mestiza
Advanced praise for Offerings to a Tumbled Temple:
Incantatory, sonically stunning, and haunting, Offerings to A Tumbled Temple soars. Urieta carefully crafts a collection that pulses with complex womanhood, grief, love, well-earned grace and a power that can barely be contained in these light-filled pages. This book is much like a “locket” that contains the body, memories, pains, and joys of a wonderfully alive speaker. This book wraps around you like a hug you long needed. I highly recommend this thrilling poet.
—Jennifer Maritza McCauley, author of When Trying to Return Home
About the Author:
Leticia Urieta (she/her/hers) is a Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She works as a teaching artist, freelance writer, and editor. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an MFA in Fiction writing from Texas State University. Her chapbook, The Monster is out now from LibroMobile Press. Her hybrid collection, Las Criaturas, was published in 2021 by Flowersong Press and was a finalist for the Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction 2022 from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her dark fiction collection, The Remedy is the Disease, is forthcoming in spring 2026 from Undertaker Books. You can learn more about Leticia’s work at leticiaaurieta.com
About the Book:
Offerings to a Tumbled Temple by Leticia Urieta is an arresting, lyrical meditation on illness, embodiment, loss, and devotion. In this stunning poetry collection, Urieta transforms the lived experience of chronic pain and healing into ritual, language, and myth. The body—both sacred and wounded—becomes the site of prayer and reckoning. Through altars built of blood, memory, and tenderness, these poems offer not only lamentation but also fierce reclamation: the body as temple, tumbled yet enduring.
In poems like “Altar,” “A Year of Offerings to the Body,” and “The Graveyard of Good Health,” the speaker communes with ancestors and the intimate pain of illness. Urieta’s language is both sacred and visceral—obsidian blades, jars of trapped words, and the pulse of a beating heart blur the boundaries between spiritual and corporeal worlds.
Drawing inspiration from writers such as Sonya Huber, Ada Limón, and Torrin A. Greathouse, Urieta writes toward acceptance and reclamation. Offerings to a Tumbled Temple is a testament to survival and love in all its painful forms—a book that insists on the beauty of the body’s resilience.
Urieta’s voice is intimate, haunting, and fiercely compassionate—a guide for anyone seeking to reconnect to the body’s wisdom, to grief’s strange grace, and to the art of living through pain.
