The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (Camino del Sol) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816524939 ISBN 13: 9780816524938

Publisher: University of Arizona Press, 2007

Synopsis

The Wind Shifts gathers, for the first time, works by emerging Latino and Latina poets in the twenty-first century. Here readers will discover 25 new and vital voices including Naomi Ayala, Richard Blanco, David Dominguez, Gina Franco, Sheryl Luna, and Urayoán Noel. All of the writers included in this volume have published poetry in well-regarded literary magazines. Some have published chapbooks or first collections, but none had published more than one book at the time of selection. This results in a freshness that energizes the enterprise.

Certainly there is poetry here that is political, but this is not a polemical book; it is a poetry book. While conscious of their roots, the artists are equally conscious of living in the contemporary world—fully engaged with the possibilities of subject and language. The variety is tantalizing. There are sonnets and a sestina; poems about traveling and living overseas; poems rooted in the natural world and poems embedded in suburbia; poems nourished by life on the U.S.–Mexico border and poems electrified by living in Chicago or Los Angeles or San Francisco or New York City.

Some of the poetry is traditional; some is avant-garde; some is informed by traditional poetry in Spanish; some follows English forms that are hundreds of years old. There are love poems, spells that defy logic, flashes of hope, and moments of loss. In short, this is the rich and varied poetry of young, talented North American Latinos and Latinas.

About this title

Reviews

The title of this ravishing collection of poems by 25 Latino and Latina writers can be read as an allusion to change and to the fact that poetry is a force, like wind, that knows no borders. In his rich and orienting introduction, poet and editor Aragon affirms that Latino poetry is evolving and extending its reach in sync with the vitality and influence of Latino life and culture. Since the publication of two earlier Latino poetry anthologies edited by Latino poets, Virgil Suarez's Paper Dance (1995) and Ray Gonzalez's ouching the Fire (1998), Latino and Latina poets have continued to write poems that can be described as political, while also exploring profoundly personal and resonantly mythic themes, delving into history, and imagining settings as diverse as the U.S.-Mexico border, a rain forest, a snow-covered street, a grocery store, a strip club, and a sacred place. Whether inspired by family, love, despair, poems by Rilke, or a painting by Jose Clemente Orozco, the poets gathered here are involved in the infinite possibilities of language. Donna Seaman
Copyright Š American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816524939
• ISBN 13: 9780816524938
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 259
• Editor: Francisco Aragón