Product Description

Raucous adobe hearts and urban violet mascara. Televised immigration games and ethnic sit-coms. Chile con karma served on a bed of race. In a startling melange of poetry, prose, journal entries, and even a screenplay, Zen Chicano desperado Juan Felipe Herrera pushes forms to the edge of possibility while forcing readers to rethink reality as well as language.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2018422 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 191 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Splicing names, dates and places with a talismanic array of bilingual references, Herrera uses the rough, unfinished notebook form more or less invented by Aime Cesaire in Notebook for a Return to the Native Land to turn his speaker's search for the truth into a force for unsettling existing political and poetic paradigms: "I stand alone on my boulevard, with my small audience of category makers, not word tuners or word flutterers or word hissers or word twisters, I said category makers. I am the idea, I am the concept, I am the liquid syrup that messes with the machine's objectives." By detailing his literary, familial (illustrated with a selection of family photographs) and activist histories, Herrera skillfully confounds preconceptions and prejudices, laying nonviolent dynamite under the tracks of those who would box him in: "We invented Chicano Studies, con manas limpias en las ma¤anas, demanding our rights (this sounds old now but we did demand our rights). With our language, our home-poems, our long walks and fasts for justice Delano, Sacra, Coachella. I can say this." Composed of equal parts generational requiem, personal reckoning and political manifesto, these notebooks are deliberately process-oriented and lack the polish of "finished" work, since they are built to deliver a hot green flavor, "let's call it a flavor; it set out on its own." Readers should dig in.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Distinguished poet and performance artist Herrera (literature, California State Univ., Fresno) here invites us to peek into his poetic diary. Starting with his youth in San Diego, Herrera guides us on a spiritual search for personal and racial identity that is carried out with an arresting display of diversity and virtuosity standard verse mixed up with prose poems, journal entries, letters, and even a sardonically satirical teleplay. This collection lacks the unity and emotion of Herrera's Love After the Riots and delivers a lot of the messages we've heard before and perhaps better expressed. But it stands out for its triumphant, almost self-deprecating sense of humor (in "Juantoomany," for example, Herrera transforms as many words as he can using his first name). Often, this humor is tinged by the juxtaposition of surrealist images, as reflected in numerous stinging one-liners ("I worry about carbohydrate lobotomies" is one of over 100 causes of concern voiced in "Don't Worry Baby"). The poems "Foodstuffs They Never Told Us About" and "Millennium Omens" are similar irreverent lists. As a veritable smorgasbord of originality, this work shows us a writer at the height of his creative powers. Recommended. Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review
"His poems . . . are a testimony of the times we live in." -- Ilan Stavans

"The richness and authenticity of the language(s) used by Herrera set him miles apart from any other Chicano poet today." -- Lauro Flores