My Father Was a Toltec, and Selected Poems

Castillo, Ana

ISBN 10: 0393037185 / ISBN 13: 9780393037180

Published by W.W. Norton & Company, 1995

About this Item

First printing in hardcover, following the 1988 paperback original. Signed by author without inscription on title page. An exceptional copy. 1995 Hard Cover. xxi, 158 pp. Author's fullest collection of poetry in both English and Spanish. "Mixing the lyrical with the colloquial, the tender with the tough, 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 uncompromising commitment and passion. My Father Was a Toltec is the sassy and street-wise collection of poems that established and secured Castillo's place in the popular canon. It is included here in its entirety along with the best of her early poems. Ana Castillo's poetry speaks - in English and Spanish - to every reader who has felt the pangs of exile, the uninterrupted joy of love, and the deep despair of love lost.

Seller Inventory # 2348736

Bibliographic Details

• Title: My Father Was a Toltec, and Selected Poems
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393037185
• ISBN 13: 9780393037180
• Binding: Hard Cover
• Edition: First Thus.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Weight: 17 ounces
• Signed: Signed by author

About this title

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.

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.