Product Description

Hailed as "not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one" (The New York Times Book Review), Sandra Cisneros has firmly established herself as an author of electrifying talent. Here are verses, comic and sad, radiantly pure and plainspoken, that reveal why her stories have been praised for their precision and musicality of language.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #137823 in Books
• Published on: 1992-11-17
• Released on: 1992-11-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This collection reveals the same affinity for distilled phrasing and surprise, both in language and dramatic development, found in Cisneros's volumes of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek and The House on Mango Street . For a glimpse of it, see the poem "Josie Bliss": "a tropical dream / of Wednesdays / a bitter sorrow / like the salt / between the breasts." Of the book's four parts, the first two immerse the reader in the Chicana homefront, including the poet's own place in it, presumably the San Antonio familiar from her prose work. The remaining two parts leave the barrio behind, as the author's world becomes more cosmopolitan and still more personal. Here Cisneros reflects on herself and her men, on how she treats them and they her. Although some poems in the last sections are excellent--"No Mercy," with its air of a prosecutor's brief, is splendid--as a love poet, Cisneros attitudinizes too much and uses her tight style more to ration her candor than to impel images. Even so, a disconcerting degree of sentimentality somehow gets through ("I forget the reasons, but I loved you once, / remember?"), along with some enervated deadpan humor: "I've learned two things. / To let go / clean as kite string. / And to never wash a man's clothes. / These are my rules."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
14 De Julio
Abuelito Who
Ame, Amo, Amare
Arturo Burro
Ass
Beatrice
Beautiful Man - France
The Blue Dress
By Way Of Explanation
Curtains
December 24th, Paris - Notre Dame
Drought
Fishing Calamari By Moon
For A Southern Man
For All Tuesday Travelers
Good Hot Dogs
His Story
Hydra Coming Down In Rain
Hydra Night - House On Fire
I The Woman
I Told Susan Reyna
I Understand It As A Kiss
In A Red-neck Bar Down The Street
Joe
Josie Bliss
Ladies, South Of France - Vence
Letter To Ilona From The South Of France
Letter To Jahn Franco - Venice
Love Poem #1
Mariela
Men Asleep
Mexican Hat Dance
Monsieur Mon Ami
Moon In Hydra
Muddy Kid Comes Home
My Wicked Wicked Ways
New Year's Eve
No Mercy
One Last Poem For Richard
Peaches - Six In A Tin Bowl, Sarajevo
The Poet Reflects On Her Solitary Fate
Postcard To The Lace Man - The Old Market, Antibes
Rodrigo De Barro
Rodrigo In The Dark
Rodrigo Returns To The Land And Linen Celebrates
Sensuality Plunging Barefoot Into Thorns
Sir James South Side
Six Brothers
The So-and-so's
Something Crazy
South Sangamon
Tantas Cosas Asustan, Tantas
To Cesare, Goodbye
Traficante
Trieste - Ciao To Italy
Twister Hits Houston
Valparaiso
Velorio
A Woman Cutting Celery
The World Without Rodrigo
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

From the Inside Flap
Hailed as "not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one" (The New York Times Book Review), Sandra Cisneros has firmly established herself as an author of electrifying talent. Here are verses, comic and sad, radiantly pure and plainspoken, that reveal why her stories have been praised for their precision and musicality of language.

Customer Reviews

Song Sung Blue
The tragic are those figures who face devestation with a certain unblinking acceptance- not stoicism, not heroism- but the ability to look at themselves clearly.

Sandra Cisneros, in her first collection of poems "My Wicked Wicked Ways" was able to evoke this sense of drama repeatedly in her monologues of fictional characters and in songs which seemed to be sung by the poet herself about her life. My personal favourite "Something Crazy" illustrates the necessary conditions of the form:

The man with the blue hat
doesn't come back anymore.
He stopped a long time ago.

Before I got married. Before the kids came.
Nobody looks at me like that anymore.
...
I was young then, understand?
Nobody ever looked at me before.
I even dreamed that he might take me
to my highschool dance, imagine.
Waitresses have come and gone,
I've stayed on.

The speaker is stationary, in the restaurant where she works- the man in the blue hat is already a thing of the past when the poem opens. She loves him because he is the ONLY thing that ever came along that loved her or that she could love. In its tone and perfection this poem reminds one of the torch-song as perfected by Billy Holiday. As in that genre the speaker stands alone and sings of a love, an overwhelming passion, almost always in the past. What is present is the pain- and the understatement of the pain and the ability through an embrace of the nostalgia of love to transcend it for a moment in a reach for remembered happiness, and recalled warmth despite the present cold. This is the tension of the genre. The speaker is pinned, unable to leave their grief, but attempts to transcend it in a song.

It is the formula, arguably, of any powerful dramatic song or poem- the speaker in pain. But the formula always depends upon the absence of a choice- these people are dramatic because fate has placed them where they are and they could not, whether they wish to or not, be anywhere else.

The title poem of "My Wicked Wicked Ways" picks up on the author's Don Juan Dad, tags him with the mixed mockery (not least self-mockery) and affection of Errol Flynn's autobiography title- and makes the best of a painful reality by recycling this family condition- as best she can- into her own bravura stance. In the poem's photo of a young married couple the father's coming affairs are not yet seen, and neither is the nature of the baby in her mother's arms:

She does not know yet
I will turn out bad.

The stance which will emerge is that of the "bad" girl, the "Loose Woman", the one who loves 'em and leaves 'em when fate or, crucially, a pose of independence, requires. I say that this stance is a pose or theatrical attitude because I find the poems of heartache and loneliness much more convincing.

In "Loose Woman", the follow up collection, the stance overwhelms the tragedy, in this book the song is sung blue and pure. Very few weak poems here. A selection that stings your throat like a shot of tequila. An album you'll put on your turn table again and again.

It doesn't get any better than this!
Sandra Cisneros is undoubtedly my favorite poet of all time. Her writing is honest, beautiful, simple, humorous, poignant and sad, all at the same time. "My Wicked Wicked Ways" is Cisneros at her best - fresh and sassy, biting and funny, thoughtful and independent. I sooooo highly recommend this book to all - whether you are an avid poetry-enthusiast or are just starting to have interest in the subject. She's wonderful!

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!!!
These are poems that will make you smile, cry, and take your breath away. A good friend reccomended Sandra Cisneros to me several years ago, and I am so thankful. I have read much of her work, and have never been disappointed. This volume of poetry is one of my favorites.