Going Home Away Indian - Softcover

Romero, Leo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0916272419 ISBN 13: 9780916272418

Publisher: Ahsahta Pr, 1990

Synopsis

[From Introduction by Joseph Somoza] Leo Romero's poems are stamped by the Southwest. But they're characterized as much by a wild originality. They can be romantic, funny, and mysterious at the same time. And they sound like no one else's poems. Romero's landscapes and characters are clearly Southwestern. He uses allegorical narratives and supernatural characters and incidents naturally, as one who grew up with cuentos, legends, and myths might be expected to do. But he transforms these traditional, regional elements. His romantic, zany imagination working through a language that is simple and understated, almost flat in places, concocts a poetry that makes one laugh and wonder, often simultaneously. This unique style Romero has been developing over the years, but his peculiar mixture of romantic, comic, and surreal didn't reach full fruition until Celso, his collection of poems that focuses on the character Celso, wise fool and lecher, poet and wino of a northern New Mexico village. Through Celso, Romero voices typical New Mexican Hispanic folk-beliefs while satirizing the foibles of the villagers and meditating on love and death?all in a style that is simultaneously lyrical and comical, surreal, commonplace, and rapturous. The poems in Going Home Away Indian continue in the style of Celso. The focus is now Native American culture rather than Hispanic. There is more political bite in some of these poems, an underlying?sometimes explicit? criticism of America's treatment of the Indian. But the writing style and mixed tone are characteristic. Here in place of the character Celso are the more surrealistic characters Skeleton Indian and Marilyn Monroe Indian, a Navajo and a Pueblo who are lovers even though they are dead. Their death is, strangely, vital, an affirmation of their authenticity, their refusal to compromise to white American culture.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ahsahta Pr
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0916272419
• ISBN 13: 9780916272418
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 103