 | Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler Subjects: Herrera Juan Felipe; Poets American -- 20th century -- Biography; Mexican American poets -- Biography; Mexican Americans -- Poetry; Splicing names, dates and places with a talismanic array of bilingual references, Herrera uses the rough, unfinished notebook form more or less invented by Aim Csaire 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. (Aug. 24) Forecast: Herrera is professor of Chicano and Latin American studies at Cal State Fresno, and most recently the author of Thunderweavers/Tejedoras de rayos and Giraffe on Fire. The former book contained perhaps too high a Spanish-to-English ratio for some readers, while the latter seemed to disappear despite being awarded a Latino Hall of Fame Book Award at BookExpo this year. This book, too good to ignore, should be Herrera's breakthrough: look for strong reviews in literary magazines and major award nominations. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved Juan Felipe Herrara was named at the U.S.next Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. He was Poet Laureate of California from 2012-2014 and is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry. (Bowker Author Biography) |
