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Adopting the turtle as a metaphor for the Native American origins of border culture, the prominent American poet interweaves lyrical poetry, prose poems, short fiction, and nonfiction commentary to forge a new Chicano manifesto, a cultural memoir that traces both his personal journey and the communal journey that Mexican Americans have traveled throughout the century.
Gonzales' fifth poetry collections resurrects ghosts of long-dead Indians and Mexicans, mythic mountain men, relatives, snakes, scorpions, and lizards in a continuing exploration of Chicano heritage and self-identity.
The award-winning author returns to his roots in the Southwest, driving the highways of New Mexico and Texas, and writing about the changing landscape and a thriving and diverse border culture.
Skillfully edited by John McNally, Bottom of the Ninth: Great Contemporary Baseball Short Stories collects nineteen contemporary baseball short stories from a successful mix of well-established writers, lesser-knowns, and a few up-and-comers. These stories are characterized by the same dramatic elements that draw people to the sport itself--the mythologizing of players, the obsessions and romance of the game, the bonds between players and fans, parents and children. From a key play, a missed catch, a chance lost, these are tales of characters facing high stakes and calls to action, metaphorically and literally, in the bottom of the ninth.
For poet Ray Gonzalez, growing up in El Paso during the 1960s was a time of loneliness and vulnerability. He encountered discrimination in high school not only for being Latino but also for being a non-athlete in a school where sports were important. Like many young people, he found diversion in music; unlike most, he found solace in the desert. In these vignettes, Gonzalez shares memories of boyhood that tell how he discovered the natural world and his creative spirit. Through 29 storylike essays, he takes readers into the heart of the desert and the soul of a developing poet. Gonzalez introduces us to the people who shaped his life. We learn of his father's difficulties with running a pool hall and of his grandmother's steadfast religious faith. We meet sinister Texas Rangers, hallucinatory poets, illegal aliens, and racist high school jocks. His vivid recollections embrace lizard hunts and rattlesnake dreams, rock music and menudo making—all in stories that convey the pains and joys of growing up on the border. As Gonzalez leads us through his desert of hope and vision, we come to recognize the humor and sadness that permeate this special place.
Few poets have so artfully confronted American life as Louis Simpson. Persona speakers struggle with everyday issues against a backdrop of larger forces, the individual's maladjustment to a culture of materialism and brutal competition, the failure of marriage under the pressures of such a society, the failure of the American dream. Simpson wages a lover's quarrel with the world. "Louis Simpson has perfect pitch. His poems win us first by their drama, their ways of voicing our ways . . . of making do with our lives. Then his intelligence cajoles us to the brink of a cliff of solitude and we step over into the buoyant element of true poetry."--Seamus Heaney Educated at Munro College (West Indies) and at Columbia University, Louis Simpson has taught widely, most recently at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of seventeen books of poetry and ten works of prose. He has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poetry, the Hudson Review, the Guggenheim Foundation, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
In his distinctive and spirited way, Ray Gonzalez, the well-known essayist, poet, fiction writer, and anthologist, reflects on the American SouthwestÑwhere he was raised and to which he still feels attached (even though he has lived much of his life elsewhere). It is a place that tugs at him, from its arid desert landscapes to its polyglot citiesÑpart Mexican, part Anglo, part something in-betweenÑalways in the process of redefining themselves. Nowhere does the process of redefinition hit Gonzalez quite as hard as in his native city of El Paso, Texas. There he finds the Òsegregated little town of my childhoodÓ transformed into Òa metropolis of fast Latino zip codes . . . a world where ...
The award-winning author returns to his roots in the Southwest, driving the highways of New Mexico and Texas, and writing about the changing landscape and a thriving and diverse border culture.
In Farewell to the Starlight in Whiskey, Barton Sutter explores the wilderness along the Canadian border, sings about love in midlife, meditates on the roots of war, attacks political leaders, recounts peculiar heroics of an epileptic Vietnam vet, writes a "personal" ad in the voice of a chickadee and talks to a dead jackpine. A deft practitioner of meter and rhyme, Sutter is a fireside storyteller who makes the language thump and sing. Barton Sutter is the only author to win the Minnesota Book Award in three different categories, including poetry, for The Book of Names: New and Selected Poems (BOA). He teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin, Superior. He lives in Duluth, MN.
Provides personal accounts of people who were raised during the Cold War and of those who were directly in contact with nuclear weapons during World War II, the Korean War, and the Persian Gulf War, focusing on the health and environmental hazards of nuclear weapons.