In 1995, she was accepted to attend a summer writing workshop for women in the Oregon wilderness. Naomi Shihab Nye, a teacher in the program, said she was having a hard time trying to select the members for the class when she came across Cortez's poems. Her poems, with their tough muscles, neat lines and rippling visceral imagery, woke me right up. It was not only the rarity of police-world imagery in her poems that captured me, or the tantalizing, edgy sexiness discovered late at night, but an organic sense of narrative, a gripping rightness in how she shaped and layered a vivid scene. Many of her scenes made an eerie underworld feel very near.
Mystery is essential in our lives.
We all have an innate need for mystery and also an innate need to understand it. While readers might assume that the poems are autobiographical, Cortez says that most are not. She says the poem's voice is not always the writer's and that she writes about cultural experiences. I am always looking for the truth of the poem. I am always reaching for that story under the story.