April 3rd, 2008 Three Poets from The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry
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David Dominguez, Scott Inguito, Adela Najarro
The Wind Shifts gathers, for the first time, works by emerging Latino and Latina poets in the twenty-first century. All of the writers included in this volume have published poetry in well-regarded literary magazines. Some have published chapbooks or first collections, but none had published more than one book at the time of selection. This results in a freshness that energizes the enterprise. Certainly there is poetry here that is political, but this is not a polemical book; it is a poetry book. There are sonnets and a sestina; poems about traveling and living overseas; poems rooted in the natural world and poems embedded in suburbia; poems nourished by life on the U.S.–Mexico border and poems electrified by living in Chicago or Los Angeles or San Francisco or New York City. In short, this is the rich and varied poetry of young, talented North American Latinos and Latinas.
Reviews:
The title of the ravishing collection of poems by 25 Latino and Latina writers can be read as an allusion to change and to the fact that poetry is a force, like wind, that knows know borders. Whether inspired by family, love, despair, poems by Rilke, or a painting by Jose Clemente Orozco, the poets gathered here are involved in the infinite possibilities of language.
This is a compelling and exhilarating addition to Latino letters.
Friday, February 1st Tim Z. Hernandez
Tim Z. Hernandez is the author of the American Book Award Winning collection Skin Tax.
Hernandez is a poet of obvious and quickly
realized skills...his images are brilliant, sharp, and concise, his
language spare yet rich. Poetry of the here and now, BROWN LOTUS, is
the kind of task that should have been undertaken long ago!
-Amiri Baraka, poet & playwright