From Publishers Weekly:
"'If a psychiatrist saw such fantasy / him make for airport.' A key figure in the Nuyorican school of poetry that came together in the late '60s on New York's Lower East Side, Cruz has continued to develop his hybrid poetics, from books like By Lingual Wholes (1982) and Red Beans (1991) to Panoramas (1997) and recent small-press work.
"In fact, this collection includes large swaths of previously unpublished poems from four decades worth of work, beginning with poems from the mid-'60s and moving through Papo Got His Gun (1966) and Snaps (1969), two books that brought early acclaim...
"The poems as a whole evince a wryly matter-of-fact, documentarian approach to urban life that feels utterly contemporary...Cruz's idioms hit highs and lows effortlessly, singularly and with political bite."
Other Notable Books
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