A poem is a living library, a hospitable planet in black space, a bell waiting to wear the music of motion across stilled lands. Writers are the carriers of the voices around us. We are writers and readers in dark times when words are correctly understood as powerful weapons. --From the Introduction Reading Rane Arroyo's poems is a little like watching a movie playing at fastforward speed on the TV in your darkened bedroom. The colors pop and snap, the images leap and recede, the colors seem brighter than life--and you can't stop watching even long enough to blink. It's an...
A poem is a living library, a hospitable planet in black space, a bell waiting to wear the music of motion across stilled lands. Writers are the ca...
These fine poems are connected by and evoke the music of lost homelands. Paegle, the daughter of immigrants from Argentina and Latvia, takes us through the tumult of displacement and migration with a strong sense for the folk songs and tango music of her youth. Against this musical backdrop, she invests the bandoneon, an accordion-like instrument brought to Argentina in the late nineteenth century, with a special significance. Her poetic account of the instrument yields this striking tribute, which testifies to the passion of the collection: when mission music spilled, / five octaves went...
These fine poems are connected by and evoke the music of lost homelands. Paegle, the daughter of immigrants from Argentina and Latvia, takes us throug...
In 2004 twenty-eight women and young girls were murdered in Ciudad Juarez and the surrounding areas. The tragedy escalated to fifty-eight murders in 2006, then again to eighty-six in 2008, and current estimates top four hundred deaths. Now poet Valerie Martinez offers a poetic exploration of these events, pushing boundaries stylistically and artistically with vivid poems that contextualize femicide. Martinez departs from traditional narrative to reveal the hidden effects and outcomes of the horrific and heart-wrenching cases of femicide. These poems lyric fragments and prose passages...
In 2004 twenty-eight women and young girls were murdered in Ciudad Juarez and the surrounding areas. The tragedy escalated to fifty-eight murders in 2...
How does a contemporary woman with a career as a poet, professor, and editor experience motherhood with one small child, another soon to be born, and her own mother suddenly diagnosed with a brain tumor and Alzheimer's? The dichotomy between life as a mother and life as an artist and professional is a major theme in modern literature because often the two seem irreconcilable. In Bring Down the Little Birds, Carmen Gimenez Smith faces this seeming irreconcilability head-on, offering a powerful and necessary lyric memoir to shed light on the difficulties--and joys--of being a mother...
How does a contemporary woman with a career as a poet, professor, and editor experience motherhood with one small child, another soon to be born, and ...
Using both lyrical and narrative forms, these concise verses explore a family history set against the larger backdrop of Mexican history, immigration, and landscapes of the Southwest. The poet's delicate touch lends these poems an organic quality that allows her to address both the personal and the political with equal grace. Straightforward without being simplistic or reductive, these poems manage to be intimate without seeming self-important. This distinctive collection ranges from the frighteningly whimsical image of Cortes dancing gleefully around a cannon to the haunting and...
Using both lyrical and narrative forms, these concise verses explore a family history set against the larger backdrop of Mexican history, immigration,...
When Moses descended Mount Sinai carrying the Ten Commandments, he never could have foreseen how one family in Los Angeles in the early twenty-first century would struggle to live by them. Conchita, a voluptuous, headstrong single woman of a certain age, sees nothing wrong with enjoying the company of handsome--and usually much younger--men . . . that is, until she encounters a widower with unusual gifts and begins to think about what she really wants out of life. Julieta, Conchita's younger sister, walks a more traditional path, but she and her husband each harbor secrets that...
When Moses descended Mount Sinai carrying the Ten Commandments, he never could have foreseen how one family in Los Angeles in the early twenty-first c...
In these engaging and often gripping short stories, Fred Arroyo takes us into the lives of working-class Hispanic migrants and immigrants, who are often invisible while they work in plain sight across America. As characters intertwine and evolve across stories, Arroyo creates a larger narrative that dramatizes the choices we make to create identity, make meaning, and deal with hardships and loss. His stories are linked by a concern with borders, both real and imagined, and the power that memory and imagination have to shape and structure our lives. Through his characters and their...
In these engaging and often gripping short stories, Fred Arroyo takes us into the lives of working-class Hispanic migrants and immigrants, who are ...
Poet Roberto Tejada uses lyrical poems to explore and give a voice to the troubles of global citizenship, US Mexico relations, Latino identity, and the political emotion of queer sexualities. His collection provides a holistic ground-level view of pivotal world events from the mid 1990s to a more recent present.
Tejada s innovative work dramatically widens the scope of Latina/o literature, showing us exactly what it can accomplish. The poems move very much like a three-act play, in which the first act is one of origins; the second, a staging of desire; and the third, a symbiosis....
Poet Roberto Tejada uses lyrical poems to explore and give a voice to the troubles of global citizenship, US Mexico relations, Latino identity, and...
In the Mexican Catholic tradition, retablos are ornamental structures made of carved wood framing an oil painting of a devotional image, usually a patron saint. Acclaimed author and essayist Rigoberto Gonzalez commemorates the passion and the pain of these carvings in his new volume Red-Inked Retablos, a moving memoir of human experience and thought.
This frank new collection masterfully combines accounts from Gonzalez s personal life with reflections on writers who have influenced him. The collection offers an in-depth meditation on the development of gay Chicano literature...
In the Mexican Catholic tradition, retablos are ornamental structures made of carved wood framing an oil painting of a devotional image, usually a ...
Natural Takeover of Small Things is a collection of poetry that offers an unflinching view of California s Heartland, the San Joaquin Valley. In his distinctive, lyrical, pull-no-punches style, Tim Z. Hernandez offers a glimpse of the people, the landscape, the rhythm, and the detritus of the rural West. As Hernandez peels back the facade of the place, he reveals that home is not always where the heart is. The book opens with an image of Fresno as the inexhaustible nerve/in the twitching leg of a dog/three hours after being smashed/beneath the retread wheel/of a tomato truck en...
Natural Takeover of Small Things is a collection of poetry that offers an unflinching view of California s Heartland, the San Joaquin Valley. I...
