Castillo's celebrated literary career as an accomplished author in multiple genres spans five decades and is strongly linked to political, racial, class, and cultural movements. This all accrues into Xicanisma, Castillo's take on Chicana feminism. The critical spirit of Xicanisma animates her latest poetry collection as she interrogates these ideas with renewed vigor in the era of Black Lives Matter ("A new century rolled in & / we still can't breathe") and takes the wearying long view: "Not for the first time had we lived through / military occupation on public streets." If some poems strike at first as too baldly political--a list of mass shootings between 2016 and 2019 scrolls on for eight pages--that's Castillo's point: factual testaments to ugly realities must share the page with intensely personal, gutting testimonials, like "Detention," a harrowing tale of the speaker's crossing from Mexico into the U.S. Castillo also writes from the perspective of a Juchitecan muxe, a person of third gender in Oaxacan culture. With seven poems written in Spanish, then translated into English, this is quintessential Castillo.