Demetria Martinez has entered the public consciousness by way of the heart. In 1994, she captured a Western States Book Award with her first novel, Mother Tongue, which went on to win widespread national attention. Now, in Breathing between the Lines, the writer returns to poetry, her first love. Many of the poems in this book touch on the themes from Mother Tongue, about an American activist who falls in love with a Salvadoran political refugee.

Weaving together threads of love and family, social conviction and activism, loss and renewal, Breathing between...

"She asked me if I liked them. And what could I say? They were wonderful." From the very beginning of Sergio Troncoso's celebrated story "Angie Luna," we know we are in the hands of a gifted storyteller. Born of Mexican immigrants, raised in El Paso, and now living in New York City, Troncoso has a rare knack for celebrating life.

Writing in a straightforward, light-handed style reminiscent of Grace Paley and Raymond Carver, he spins charming tales that reflect his experiences in two worlds. Troncoso's El Paso is a normal town where common people who happen to be Mexican eat,...

Returning home after a long absence is not always easy. For Ray Gonzalez, it is more than a visit; it is a journey to the underground heart. He has lived in other parts of the country for more than twenty years, but this award-winning poet now returns to the desert Southwest--a native son playing tourist--in order to unearth the hidden landscapes of family and race.

As Gonzalez drives the highways of New Mexico and west Texas, he shows us a border culture rejuvenated by tourist and trade dollars, one that will surprise readers for whom the border means only illegal immigration,...

A first-generation Latino born in Chicago, Rane Arroyo is a leading poeta puertorriqueno and playwright whose readership transcends his ethnicity. In Home Movies of Narcissus, his fourth collection of poetry, he writes more deliberately and with greater assurance of his search for identity both cultural/racial and gender/sexual and his discovery of it within family and community.
Using sophisticated language to inspect life from barrio childhood to cosmopolitan manhood, Arroyo explores themes of gay strength and alienation, linked to his experiences as both a...

Raucous adobe hearts and urban violet mascara. Televised immigration games and ethnic sit-coms. Chile con karma served on a bed of race. In a startling melange of poetry, prose, journal entries, and even a screenplay, Zen Chicano desperado Juan Felipe Herrera fixes his gaze on his own life and times to craft his most personal work to date.

Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is a river of faces and phrases, jottings and reflections--a personal pilgrimage and collective parade of love, mock-prophecy, and chiste. Tuning in voices from numerous time zones, languages, and minds,...

The whispers of buried lives. The silence of a growing resistance. The stigma of poverty. In haunting images, Juan Delgado explores the boundaries we cross daily.

These poems deal honestly with the realities of urban life, whether dramatizing the effects of drive-by shootings, unfolding a labor protest that "spreads across the city like a prayer," or summoning a ghostlike immigrant damned to retrace his journey across the border. Daily and historical struggles are elevated to the level of myth. Yet, amid these poems there are images of life and love: a girl leaving hickeys rich as...

Huitzilopochtli has returned. Aztec destroyer, god of sun and war. He of the hummingbird. Son of Coatlique, Our Lady of the Serpent Skin. But you can call him H. H. is reborn in the sprawling suburbs of an American metroplex in the late twentieth century, a place where "the future is a cartoon of the future." Life in suburbia is hard for an Aztec god: H. falls in and out of love, works downtown as an oficinista, raises children, and learns to command the awesome power of modern electronic media. Then one indifferent summer's day H. is seriously wounded by the police in a case...

Here is Kathryn, "nearly 88, infinity next to infinity, / but infinity curled on itself, a whirlwind / that whipped about the house and was gone, / rain in its wake, a smell of dirt."

Kathryn is near the end of her life and is losing her memories: travels, husbands, a storm of keepsakes. As Gina Franco unleashes that storm and as Kathryn's flood of memories washes over us, we know at once that we are in the hands of a truly gifted poet. "The Keepsake Storm" is the culmination of a verse cycle that probes the depths of the heart--a meditation on the meaning of life in a difficult...

In her second collection of poems, Valerie Martinez builds on the artistic command of language that characterized her award-winning first volume, Absence, Luminescent. Taking on not only such familiar themes as love and loss, family and culture, but also the creative act of poetry itself, World to World crosses new boundaries to chart a mature poet s awareness of her own voice and style.
Martinez explores the dynamic of creation/dissolution in original and intriguing ways. Here are the strange and provocative landscapes of the body and its disappearance . . . of...

Marcos McPeek Villatoro is not afraid to discuss mysteries, truths, or injustices. He has lived them. Poet and novelist, activist and radio personality, Villatoro writes poetry steeped in formalism, free verse, and his own Salvadoran syntax. This new collection is a memoir-in-poems telling how the world appears to a Latin American immigrant. His sense of humanity is intact. He has a family, a job, a life in the States. But the face of the Mayan hero Tekun Uman hangs in his office, and he has "made clear all political positions by standing behind the wooden mask of a dead man."

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