Canto hondo / Deep Song
ISBN: 9780816531714
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of Arizona Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Mexican American poetry (Spanish); American poetry;

Canto hondo / Deep Song honors the Andalusian deep lyric, or canto hondo , poetry of famed Spanish writer Federico García Lorca through rich and expressive poems. Francisco X. Alarcón deftly places Spanish and English side-by-side in this bilingual collection that is a modern meditation on love, self, loss, and universal truths.

In this new collection, Alarcón creates poetry with roots in Gypsy songs clapped out in the distinctively short rhythms of flamenco music. Each page lifts the heart and stirs the soul by delving deep into the struggle for self and sexual identity.

Canto hondo / Deep Song includes 106 poems divided into four sections that articulate struggle, otherness, and the meaning of the poetic landscape. Like Lorca, Alarcón seeks out the fault lines where the lyric and the political bleed productively and proactively into one another.

An important voice in Chicano and GLBT poetry, Alarcón writes with a complex, emotionally powerful style that is accessible to students and all lovers of poetry and poetic traditions.

Francisco X. Alarcón was born in Los Angeles, California on February 21, 1954. He grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico. He received an undergraduate degree from California State University at Long Beach and a MA from Stanford University. He was the author of 14 collections of poetry for both children and adults.

His collections of poetry for adults include Body in Flames/Cuerpo en Llamas; De Amor Oscuro/Of Dark Love; From the Other Side of Night/Del Otro Lado de la Noche: New and Selected Poems; Ce Uno One: Poemas para el Nuevo Sol/Poems for the New Sun; Borderless Butterflies: Earth Haikus and Other Poems/Mariposas sin Fronteras: Haikus Terrenales y Otros Poemas; and Canto Hondo/Deep Song. Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation won the American Book Award. He also received the 1984 Chicano Literary Prize, the 1993 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and a Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association in 2002.

His collections of poetry for children include Angels Ride Bikes and Other Fall Poems/Los Angeles Andan en Bicicleta y Otros Poemas de Otoño and Iguana in the Snow and Other Winter Poems/Iguanas en la Nieve y Otros Poemas de Invierno. Laughing Tomatoes and Other Spring Poems/Jitomates Risuenos y Otros Poemas de Primavera won the National Parenting Publications Gold Award and From the Bellybutton of the Moon and Other Summer Poems/Del Ombligo de la Luna y Otros Poemas de Verano won the American Library Association's Pura Belpré Honor Award for Latino Literature.

He served as director of the Spanish for Native Speakers Program at the University of California at Davis, and taught for the Art of the Wild workshop and the California Poets in the Schools program. He died of cancer on January 15, 2016 at the age of 61.

(Bowker Author Biography)


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