"People who live in California deny the past," asserts Alejandro Murguia. In a state where "what matters is keeping up with the current trends, fads, or latest computer gizmo," no one has "the time, energy, or desire to reflect on what happened last week, much less what happened ten years ago, or a hundred." From this oblivion of memory, he continues, comes a false sense of history, a deluded belief that the way things are now is the way they have always been.

In this work of creative nonfiction, Murguia draws on memories--his own and his family's reaching back to the eighteenth...

From Mexico City to San Francisco's Mission District, nothing comes easy--in life or in love. Here is an unstereotypical view of a world as treacherous as it is tender, as hilarious as it is heartbreaking. Authentic and honest, these nine stories focus on today's Latino men, their strength and vulnerability, their fears and deepest desires.

-Danger, cruelty, lust, loss, blood, death and dance . . . . Couldn't put the book down. So hot I had to smother it in half and half. Murguia's a master of hearts on fire, working his storytelling anvil late at night, in a wrecked cubicle of SF...

Stray Poems opens with San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguia's inaugural address, where he provides a brilliant and impassioned poetic account of San Francisco's Native and Latino literary history. What follows is a selection of Murguia's most recent work, composed over the past twelve years. These are poems of the twenty-first century, written in a combination of English and Spanish--the patois of contemporary America. Angry, rebellious, subversive, sentimental, hip, urban, local, global.

Alejandro Murguia is the author of Southern Front and This War...