I wish I could find the words to tell you the story of our village after you were killed. So begins Senegal Taxi, the new work by one of contemporary poetry s most vibrant voices, Juan Felipe Herrera. Known for his activism and writings that bring attention to oppression and injustice, Herrera turns to stories of genocide and hope in Sudan. Senegal Taxi offers the voices of three children escaping the horrors of war in Africa.
Unflinching in its honesty, brutality, and beauty, the collection fiercely addresses conflict and childhood, inviting readers to engage in complex...

In this love story of impossible odds, award-winning writer Tim Z. Hernandez weaves a rich and visionary portrait of Bea Franco, the real woman behind famed American author Jack Kerouac's "The Mexican Girl." Set against an ominous backdrop of California in the 1940s, deep in the agricultural heartland of the Great Central Valley, Manana Means Heaven reveals the desperate circumstances that lead a married woman to an illicit affair with an aspiring young writer traveling across the United States.

When they meet, Franco is a migrant farmworker with two children and a failing...

Emmy Perez's poetry collection With the River on Our Face flows through the Southwest and the Texas borderlands to the river's mouth in the Rio Grande Valley/El Valle. The poems celebrate the land, communities, and ecology of the borderlands through lyric and narrative utterances, auditory and visual texture, chant, and litany that merge and diverge like the iconic river in this long-awaited collection.

Perez reveals the strengths and nuances of a universe where no word is "foreign." Her fast-moving, evocative words illuminate the prayers, gasps, touches, and gritos born of...

Two brothers bury a statue of Saint Jude for their grieving nana. A Griffith Park astronomer makes his own discovery at an East L.A. wedding. A young man springs his Cherokee-obsessed grandfather from the confines of senility. The common thread? Each is weaving their way through the challenging field of play that is living and loving in Los Angeles.

In Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul, Bryan Allen Fierro brings to life the people and places that form the fragile heart of the East Los Angeles community. In the title story, a father's love of Dodger baseball is matched only by the...

In this vibrant reflection of sound and word, poet Edwin Torres reignites the possibilities of poetry. From poems like Me No Habla Spic, a rumination of life s major moments, to Fixative, which exercises shifting vantage points, Torres is nimble surfing through memory, definition, and forms of social address. In this new collection, Torres offers some signature performance pieces for the first time in print.
Ameriscopia reimagines New York City and its expansive inspirations, which for Torres capture the contradictions of America. Allusions to the Twin Towers, Coney Island hot dogs, and...

Through lyrical procedures of self-immolation, this brave new collection by J. Michael Martinez interrogates the sundry roles language, myth, and sexuality play for the self and the other in the recoverable and irrecoverable past. Parallel to his award-winning first collection Heredities, J. Michael Martinez pushes the boundaries of poetic form, wedding historically oppositional lyrical traditions to deliver a collection unlike any other.

Turning the page into a visual field, as in the deconstructed musical score telling the tale of La Llorona, In the Garden of the...

In this collection, which the poet calls his rebirth in the search for home, Ray Gonzalez expresses the gentle, humble intelligence that has made him a leading voice in Latino letters. He shares with the reader the voice of a soul searcher who has passed through middle age and still vibrates with passion for the world.
Gonzalez shows his profound respect for other people, species, places, elements, and histories. Illusions to religious imagery knock against those of the natural world feathers and rocks creating a complex tableau of objects and feelings. Employing the image-driven...

Fleeing a failed marriage and haunted by ghosts of his past, Luis Alberto Urrea jumped into his car several years ago and headed west. Driving cross-country with a cat named Rest Stop, Urrea wandered the West from one year's spring through the next.
Hiking into aspen forests where leaves "shiver and tinkle like bells" and poking alongside creeks in the Rockies, he sought solace and wisdom. In the forested mountains he learned not only the names of trees--he learned how to live. As nature opened Urrea's eyes, writing opened his heart. In journal entries that sparkle with discovery,...

Is poetry an alternative to or an extension of a globalized language? In Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisferico, poet Urayoan Noel maps the spaces between and across languages, cities, and bodies, creating a hemispheric poetics that is both broadly geopolitical and intimately neurological.

In this expansive collection, we hear the noise of cities such as New York, San Juan, and Sao Paulo abuzz with flickering bodies and the rush of vernaculars as untranslatable as the murmur in the Spanish rumor. Oscillating between baroque textuality and vernacular performance, Noel's...

During the advent of Chicano teatro, dozens of groups sprang up across the country in Chicano/a communities. Since then, teatristas have been leading voices in the creation and production of plays touching minds and hearts that galvanize audiences to action.

Barrio Dreams is the first book to collect the work of one of Arizona's foremost teatristas, playwright Silviana Wood. During her decades-long involvement in theater, Wood forged a reputation as a playwright, actor, director, and activist. Her works form a testimonio of Chicana life, steeped in art, politics, and the...