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...

There s no denying it, media culture has ushered in a new era of visibility for gays in America. Yet somehow the gay Latino doesn t fit into this sound-bite identity and usually isn t included in national media images. Rane Arroyo offers a corrective. Known primarily as a poet and playwright representing the gay Latino community, Arroyo has also been publishing prose throughout his career and now gathers into this book a storm of writing that has been gaining strength, drop by drop, for more than ten years.
How to Name a Hurricane collects short stories and other fictions...

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...