Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "If poetic episodes can act as gauges of social role-playing and role-disruption, what might lie 'outside' the roles 'we' 'inhabit?' What remains undocumented, but hardly silent? What are the sensed and projected traces of 'identity' that are ideologically eviscerated, and minimally verifiable? Rosa Alcala calls up a most magical theater when exploring these quandaries. The tipping (flash) points she constructs continuously build up toward the (touched, handled, engaged) experiential moment, all the while resisting an object-status art. This is a poetics that's...

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "Rosa Alcala's poems dwell in the liminal space between the personal and the political poems built on the idea that 'the world exists, ' and that work to define the metaphysical and ephemeral architectures of origin, migration, nationalism, and loss. Rosa Alcala is uncompromising, wry, and brutal: all of the qualities that significant poetic works of cultural criticism require." Carmen Gimenez Smith

"'I want to know how everything changes with the price of admission, ' writes Rosa Alcala in her extraordinary new book. These poems begin at the exact...