Latin@ Featured Poets

David Hernandez @ American Life in Poetry

David Hernandez is a featured poet of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007); his poetry collections include Always Danger (2006) and A House Waiting for Music (2003). His poem “At the Post Office” is currently featured at American Life Poetry.

“At the Post Office,” as the title suggest, recounts a moving encounter between the speaker of the poem who is trying to mail a package to an ailing friend and a postal clerk characterized as a “giant stone, cobalt blue,” a giant “slab of night” who, despite his rock-hard façade of immortality, knows of the intimacy of decay:

              

            “I know the stone knows a millennia of rain

            and wind will even grind away

            his ragged face, and all of this slow erasing

            is just a prelude to when the swelling

            universe burns out, goes dark, holds

            nothing but black holes, the bones of stars

            and planets, a vast silence. The stone

            is stone-faced. The stone asks how soon

            I want the package delivered. As fast

            as possible, I say, then start counting the days.”

[Continue reading.]

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Carmen Calatayud at Split this Rock

Published by Press 53 this past October, In the Company of Spirits, is Carmen Calatayud’s first book-length collection of poetry. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Gargoyle, PALABRA: A Magazine of Chicano and Latino Literary Art, and the anthology DC Poets Against the War. Her poem “Commitment Otra Vez” is currently featured at Split this Rock and offers a literary taste of her newly released collection, In the Company of Spirits.

 “Commitment Otra Vez,” like many of the other poems in Carmen’s newly-released book length collection, offers us a contemporary poet working to weave narratives of testimonio that blur the line between the political and the spiritual, where                

        […]spiritual warriors

            pray for your country

            and you can finally sleep

            through the night.”

[Continue reading.]

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 Rigoberto González @ Poem Flow

 Latino/a Poetry Now featured poet, Rigoberto González who was recently (along with Lorena Duarte and Xochiquetzal Candelaria) featured in this Poetry Society of America roundtable published in anticipation of installment three of the national reading series, is currently featured at Poem Flow. Poem Flow is a mobile app which everyday features and highlighting the work of contemporary American poets. Every day a new poem “flows” to thousands of cell phone screens through this poem-of-the-day app. Rigoberto González’s poem “Gila” was a recently featured on this fascinating new platform.

Titled after one of the tributaries of the Colorado River, “Gila” manifests one of the key elements of Rigoberto’s poetry, namely what Juan Felipe Herrera refers to as a “poetics of intimacy.” “Gila” like many of Rigoberto Gonzalez’s poems can infuse the most seemingly unfamiliar and alien subjects, a mummified lover, a mortician’s scar, a tributary of the Colorado River, with what Herrera calls “explosive life-force blazing toward the boundless:”

“It's no curse
        

dragging my belly across
                

the steaming sand all day.
        

I'm as thick as a callus
                

that has shorn off its leg.



If you find me I can explain
        

the trail made by a single limb.”

[Continue reading.]

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Aracelis Girmay @ The Cortland Review

Another Latino/a Poetry Now poet whose work is currently featured is that of Aracelis Girmay (Aracelis, along with Eduardo C. Corral and Rosa Alcalá were the poets featured in installment one of this national reading series). Her two poems “When They Ask Me My Name” and “(making You a House Upon My Leaving)” are currently featured at the Cortland Review.

In “When They Ask Me My Name,” the speaker of the poem declares: “I am a city.” A city that “hums electric as an exposed nerve.” Here is a speaker that is both shedding pieces of the self while at the same time acquiring pieces of the world: “I am here,” the pieces of that city declare, “having been thrown to the dogs/ & pigeons, I am the dogs & pigeons.” Here is a perpetual of lesson of loss and life:

            “My life is very long. But short compared

            to the turtle's, the stone's. I am both

            the bird whose chest flashes red

            at the window, & the cats below

            screaming Return to me.”

[Continue reading.]

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Rich Villar @ Thrush Poetry Journal

Rich Villar’s poems and essays have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Amistad, Achiote Seeds, and on NPR's "Latino USA." He has been quoted on Latino literature and culture by The New York Times and the Daily News, and he directs Acentos, an organization fostering community around Latino/a literature. His poem “Aubade at 12:56pm” is currently featured at Thrush Poetry Journal and has been nominated for the 2012 Pushcart Prize. Here is one of my favorite moments in that morning love song:

          “The sun refuses the order to shine, to bathe 

            your closed eyes in winterglow, the deep 

            red purpose of your bedroom:  I will 

            compose an ode to the Triboro Bridge, 

            the dervish upon which the city spins, wishing 

            I was Miles, playing what is not there.”

[Continue reading.]

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Deborah Parédez @ Voltage Poetry

 Deborah Parédez is a featured poet of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007) and a CantoMundo co-founder. She is also the author of This Side of Skin (2002) and the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (2009). Her poem “The Fire” is currently featured in Voltage Poetry with a critical analysis on the masterful “turns” in this poem. “Turn” here being the place in the poem where the reader is met with “surprise and heightened engagement.” The first turn (but not the principal turn in this poem) being the point in which the speaker plunges the reader in the description of a physical fire (a suicide by fire) and a “you” who extinguishes that fire; that is into the “night Tony decided to end it all:”

                   

                 “bathing his head and limbs in gasoline


                  and igniting himself into effigy”

Only to be met again by the “you” whom “[taking] all the necessary precautions” saves Tony’s life.

But this burning figure, only serves as a vehicle by which to deliver the poems “knock-out” turn in which the speaker of the poem compares herself to Tony and to the “fire” which can envelop a person “ablaze and reckless:”

            "so that years later when I, a bright girl, ablaze

            and reckless, rushed to embrace you,


            you did only what you knew best to do:


            you stayed calm, moved quickly,


            took all the necessary precautions,


            snuffed out every ember,


            saved yourself.”

[Continue reading.]

Review Roundup--January 6, 2012

Rigoberto González reviews Luis Rodríguez’s It Calls you Back (Simon & Schuster, 2011) 

I have to confess that I have still to read It Calls You Back. And this confession comes from one who considers Luis Rodríguez’s work—both in deed and word—bedrock in his literary formation. When reading Luis Rodríguez’s work I am often reminded that if one discovers a writer in a felicitous hour—in the wakefulness of spirit, in a moment of uncommon joy or suffering—that poet becomes for that reader a tutelary and redemptive spirit. For me this first encounter with Rodríguez came sometime back in 2005: Luis was giving a reading at Sonoma State University, I was a junior in high school and without a clue to the world that lay beyond a precarious upbringing. Luis read “My Name is Not Rodríguez.” That evening was my first on a college campus and that poem a baptism into the world of poetry. I went home with a copy of Always Running: La Vida Loca and a sudden urge to write: I don’t know from where or how this came to me but that night I wrote my own version of that poem—pure fire, pure nonsense.  Years later now and at different crossroads, it is with this same sense of urgency and redemption that I find myself coming full circle and returning to It Calls You Back.

Here is what Rigoberto González (who is slated to read at installment three of Latino/a Poetry Now Macalester College in October of this year) had to say:

In 1993, Luis J. Rodríguez released "Always Running: La Vida Loca," a best-selling memoir that's been celebrated for its honest portrayal of a youth on drugs and involved with gangs in Los Angeles. The impetus for the book was an attempt by the author to save his son Ramiro from succumbing to the temptations that compelled Rodriguez to join a gang by age 11 and end up in jail as a teenager.

In a long-awaited sequel, "It Calls You Back" (Simon & Schuster, $24.99 hardcover), Rodríguez confronts another stark reality: his failure to spare Ramiro that devastating fate -- including prison time. The author takes a closer look at his own life journey after his release from jail, to understand why that crucial second chance was not an option for his firstborn.

Click HERE to read the review.

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The Write Christine reviews Ruben Quesada’s Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press, 2011)

Of Ruben Quesada’s debut collection D.A. Powell writes: “Like Whitman, Quesada is a poet of motion—journeying to the center of the US, where the traditions and innovations of first-generation Americans transverse the meditative starbursts of hills…. From Costa Rica to Los Angeles and across the continent, Quesada’s poems chronicle one family’s history…carries us toward “that seam in space” where dream and experience intersect.” But not everything in this collection is sheer movement. Two of my favorite poems in this collection are “My Parents Meet” and “Father.” In “My Parents Meet” Quesada writes: “He cuts in/ on her./ His parted hair absorbing the lights,/ nesting wings of a carrion…. Bodies tangled, curve vanishes,/ against curve; fitting into each other, a human/ jigsaw: ear to temple, nape/ to palm, forearm cradles/ hip, lips enters face—.“  In “Father” the speaker is moved by the details on his father’s face: the “aquiline/ nose, the mole above/ your right eyebrow that rises/ when you laugh.” There are also moments of unexpected tenderness and playfulness that act as kind of anchors to a reader that may suddenly find herself transcribed to a place of being, a place far from constant movement and withering. What Ruben evokes over and over again in this collection is the ever elusive and endangered animal of memory. His poems, portraits of neighborhoods and its people are above all poems of moving toward memory, toward the edges of beauty, of “the alpenglow of tomorrow and tomorrow.”

Here is what The Write Christine had to say:

Ruben Quesada’s début collection of poetry, Next Extinct Mammal, is a rare treat of imagery and frankness. At a time when plain, unadorned, weird and disjointed poetry is celebrated and sought, and after so much effort has been put, for so many years, into the rejection of style – into undoing Symbolism, undoing Romanticism, undoing Confessionalism, undoing Imagism – and into reform and political awareness and academic snobbery, reading the work of a poet who is not afraid of himself or of the life and thoughts he keeps company with is a welcome change of pace.

If there is a flaw in Quesada’s writing, it’s a touch of immaturity and simplicity and perhaps an overabundance of the aforementioned frankness, but if the book is green around the edges, the middle of it is in full blom. As a unit, it paints the story of a first-generation American and his family, and breathes to life a vivacious stranger in an even stranger land dreaming not only of belonging to blood and place but of belonging to the cosmos and the edges of time and beauty. Poem to poem, Quesada delivers surprising portraits of neighborhoods, rooms, and women, of changing seasons and cities, of mothers and fathers and sisters. Soft images with sharp hidden edges appear around the corners of sentences where we don’t expect them to appear, releasing us as readers from our expectations and evicting us from our own surroundings, transplanting us into another, less judgmental place.

Click HERE to read the review. 

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Heather Treseler reviews Deborah Parédez’s This Side of Skin (Wings Press, 2002)

Keeping up with what is quickly becoming a Letras Latinas Blog tradition (the re-posting and re-appreciation of already published reviews) in these Review Roundups, and taking advantage to wish happy tenth birthday to Deborah Parédez’s collection This Side of the Skin (2002) I present you here with a review of Deborah Parédez’s This Side of the Skin by Heather Treseler and which first appeared in issue

2 of Latino Poetry Review.

Here is what Heather Treseler had to say:

As her title suggests, Deborah Parédez's first collection of poetry plumbs liminal worlds. From the classical epic to the epidermal quick, Parédez explores a roughly hewn, unhybridized world in which stories from Hades perpetuate in the minds of the living, and elegies—for forsaken loves, childhood sublimity, veterans of violence, and the characters of nostalgia—offer a shapely sadness, a rhythm ultimately heartening in the courage of its returns. In over forty dramatic lyrics, Parédez's work unfolds a mythology of her own making. Engaging with tropes from Greek fable and German poetry, Texan heartlands and salsa dance-floors, Parédez's major themes of exile and divisionary worlds evince an admirable breadth, a restless picaresque verve that dares its critics to assign this collection to any single category.

Click HERE to read the review.  

NACA & YUSEF on MTV/ in WA

Check out Kristin Naca interviewing the the final judge, Yusef Komunyakaa, who chose her manuscript, Bird Eating Bird, as a winner in the National Poetry Series competition!
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We're all here, safely in Seattle: Richard Blanco, Steven Cordova, María Meléndez, Deborah Parédez.