The Chronicles

By evoking the Old Testament book referenced in the title of the collection, The Chronicles recounts distinctive aspects of a Mexican American’s presence in California. Fairy tales, bible stories, and Greek myths are reinvented as the genealogy of a poet obsessed by memory and the transformations of dislocation. The Frog Prince longs to be a frog again, Sleeping Beauty doesn’t know who she is, Medusa is a misunderstood femme-fatale, Bluebeard is a desired eccentric, and Marilyn Monroe wins the first annual Miss Artichoke beauty contest. Ramón García brings to life landscapes populated by misfits who find—like their mythical counterparts—a sense of belonging between the marvelous and the ordinary, memory and reality. In coming to terms with the intricacies of immigration and migration, García defamiliarizes well-known tales, rewriting enchanting and disturbing versions of stories we thought we knew. 

The author of Other Countries (What Books Press, 2010) and Ricardo Valverde (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Ramón García has published poetry in a variety of journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry 1996, Ambit, The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of US-Hispanic Literature (1998), Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Los Angeles Review, and Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. A founding member of the Glass Table Collective, an artist collective formed in 2008, he is a professor at California State University, Northridge and lives in Los Angeles.