Looking Out, Looking in: Anthology of Latino Poetry (Hispanic Civil Rights (Paperback)) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1558857613 ISBN 13: 9781558857612

Publisher: Arte Publico Press, 2013

Synopsis

The poems included in this comprehensive anthology run the gamut of styles and themes, but all are by Latinos writing from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Some deal with issues specific to the Hispanic experience, such as displacement, identity and language. Others ponder universal concerns, such as love, family and humanity. In "Letter to Arturo," Mexican-American poet Lucha Corpi pens a song of love to her son: "You've hardly left / and already I miss the light / caress of your hands / on my hair, / and your laughter and your tears, / and all your questions / about seas, / moons and deserts. / And all my poems / are tying themselves together / in my throat."
More than 60 Latino poets are represented in this wide-ranging collection that focuses on poetry from the four largest groups in the United States: Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans and Dominican Americans. In his introduction, scholar William Luis gives an overview of the origins of Latino literature in the United States, providing historical, political and cultural frameworks for these groups and their writings.
Included are distinguished poets such as Julia Alvarez, Gloria Anzaldua, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Martin Espada and Pedro Pietri, as well as less well-known writers who deserve more recognition. Whether writing about timeless issues or themes specific to their community, the poets in this volume craft a multilayered look at what it means to be Latino in the United States. Looking Out, Looking In is an indispensable and welcome addition to American and Latino literatures.

About this title

About the Author

William Luis, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Spanish at Vanderbilt University, is the editor of Afro-Hispanic Review. He is also the author of numerous books, including Dance Between Two Cultures: Latino-Caribbean Literature Written in the United States (Vanderbilt University Press, 1997), Culture and Customs of Cuba (Greenwood Press, 2001) and Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative (University of Texas Press, 1990). The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012, Luis lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.

From Booklist

Any anthology of Latino literature is sure to include heated political rhetoric, reflections on migrant workers, plenty of hot food prepared at home, and passages splashed with Spanish, and here Luis delivers. As a professor of Spanish and author of numerous books on Latino-Caribbean literature, Luis has chosen to showcase poets of Mexican, Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban heritage who write primarily in English (and occasionally in Spanish) in the U.S. While this anthology includes well-known poets representative of each region—like Gloria Anzaldúa, Julia Alvarez, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Pablo Medina—Luis emphasizes Mexican American poets born during the 1940s and 1950s, like Gary Soto, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Lorna Dee Cervantes, who have extended the literary arm of the 1960s Chicano movement into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. While he includes only one poem each from this year’s inaugural poet, Richard Blanco, and relative newcomer Gabriela Jauregui (and the absence of such writers as Rigoberto González, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Luís Alberto Urrea seems curious), Luis has compiled a solid introduction to Latino poetry. --Diego Báez

About this edition

• Publisher: Arte Publico Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1558857613
• ISBN 13: 9781558857612
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 329
• Editor: Luis William