Author Description

These are vivid, visceral poems about coming of age in a place 'where the Ferris Wheel / was the tallest thing in the valley, ' where a boy would learn 'to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken's neck / with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.'... In spite of such hardscrabble cruelties"or because of them"there is also a real tenderness in these poems, the revelations of bliss driving along an empty highway 'like opening a heavy book, / letting the pages feather themselves and finding a dried flower.'... The poet has a gift for rendering his world in cinematic images.... In short, these poems are the stuff of life itself, ugly and beautiful, wherever or whenever we happen to live it. "Martin Espada