Synopsis
Ana Castillo has a deserved reputation as one of the country's most powerful and entrancing novelists, but she began her literary career as a poet of passion and uncompromising commitment. This collection brings back into print the best of her early work, including selected poems from The Invitation and Women Are Not Roses and the entire text of her landmark 1988 collection, My Father Was a Toltec. Whether invoking her origins as the daughter of a street warrior, a member of the Toltec gang in Chicago, or defining her own lyrical positions on a variety of social, political, sexual, and esthetic issues, Ana Castillo's poetic voice is unmistakably her own - and will be immediately recognizable to the lovers of her fiction.
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Reviews
If fire and spirit could make interesting poems, then this collection would be very good indeed. Instead, we have mostly polemical poetry; as Castillo herself says, "my new speech is echoes/with the tongue that sounds/of tumbling wooden blocks." Castillo, who has also written three novels and four other collections of poetry (all published by small press publishers; some of the poems are republished here), writes in both English and Spanish (untranslated) about gritty urban subjects: welfare, suicide, street violence, affairs. The English poems lack music; for example, "Everywhere i go/i am asked my origin/as if i bore antennae/or the eye/of the Cyclops." Sometimes Castillo's grammar is at fault-e.g., "there's an empty chair past Egberto with bad breath"-but mostly these poems avoid reaching for mystery, as in these lines: "These days are getting shorter./The nights kept getting longer./ The kitchen clock starts ticking/louder." What Castillo does best is detail two cultures both clashing and commingling, but these poems only leave the reader wanting more mystery, more song. Not recommended.
Doris Lynch, Bloomington P.L., Ind.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems
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My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems
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My Father was a Toltec and Selected Poems 1973-1988
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Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. 158 pages. Octavo (8 1/2" x 5 3/4") bound in original publisher's black cloth with gilt lettering to spine and letters to cover in a rectangle box. First edition. Ana Castillo has a deserved reputation as one of the country's most powerful and entrancing novelists, but she began her literary career as a poet of passion and uncompromising commitment. This collection brings back into print the best of her early work, including selected poems from The invitation and Women are not Roses and the entire text of her landmark 1988 collection, My Father was a Toltec. Condition: Light wear to corners. Jacket spine sunned else a very good copy in a very good to fine jacket. Seller Inventory # BOOKS001933
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