Anger is a Gift

Review: Anger is a Gift: An Anthology of Resistance and Response Poems to the 2024 Election. Eds. Adrian Ernesto Cepeda and Edward Vidaurre. McAllen, TX: 2026.

Margaret Elysia Garcia

After the 2024 election, poet Adrian Ernesto Cepeda was really feeling it. Not unlike most of us, he felt (and still feels like) the country disregarded what was obvious to him and most of us—that immigrants, that Latinas Latinos and Chicanas Chicanos would have targets on our backs. 

That target would be coated in misplaced tropes and stereotypes and scapegoating and as we have seen too much lately, it does not matter whether one is documented or undocumented—ICE and the Trump Administration is out for blood, our blood.

It’s enough to make us more than angry. It is in this political climate that Flowersong Press’ newest anthology Anger is a Gift was born. 

But Anger is a Gift really started as an idea between Adrian and a Costa Rican poet friend of his. They often shared their work with each other. Adrian shared the first poem in the anthology that he penned himself and his friend was blown away.  His friend told him that all these reactions to the new administration need to be in a book.

Adrian hadn’t edited a book of poems, but the drive and motivation were there. He thought about publishers he’d worked with in the past and approached some. No one was really into it, or perhaps, did not see the critical angle a book like this would have in these times. Adrian contacted Edward Vidaurre, publisher at Flowersong Press in Texas.  Vidaurre had Adrian draft a proposal and Edward loved the idea. What stood out to Edward Vidaurre was that the proposal “wasn’t trying to define anger” but rather, it was inviting people into the anger.

“We live in a time where everyone is told to calm down, move on, forgive, be civil. But for a lot of people, anger isn't something they choose. It's a response to injustice, loss, racism, violence, silence, or simply not being heard. Adrian understood that,” said Edward. After reading the initial draft, Vidaurre felt like the content was less about being angry and more about being human. He liked that.

Adrian’s concentration as an editor was to find distinct shorter pieces. And even though he chose to put the poets in alphabetical order, he made sure each piece sang to the piece it was next to in the collection.

“After reading the first draft, I realized this wasn't going to be a book about being angry. It was going to be a book about being human. And no two writers’ responses to the theme of anger arrived the same way,” said Edward.

“Some pieces are loud. Some are quiet. Some are deeply personal while others speak to what's happening in the world around us. I don't think there's one poem that carries the book. I think it's the conversation between all of them that makes the anthology work,” said publisher Vidaurre.

Adrian Cepeda sees the book having potential on college campuses, “this is something that will open up a dialogue.” His wife, who is an adjunct professor, suggested the critical discussion questions at the back of the anthology in hopes the book will be read and used by colleges and universities.

Cepeda also has a poem at the end that takes that anger and turns it into hopefulness. He liked the idea of a rose being the symbol of resistance, and like a 90s CD, it’s that extra song at the end that quietly defines the rest of the music.

Adrian was also going for a more universal appeal and approach to the anthology. Anger against the current political establishment of course, but also more than that. He wanted people to pick it up in any part of the Americas in any year and relate to it. A Macondo, if you will.

“As a publisher, that's always what I'm looking for. Not just strong individual pieces, but work that begins talking to the piece before it, and the piece after it. The anthology became something larger than any one writer could have created alone,” said Edward Vidaurre, the publisher.

FlowerSong has published several anthologies over the years, and publisher Edward Vidaurre loves them. “A single-author collection lets you spend time inside one person's imagination. An anthology lets you witness a community thinking together. I think both are equally important and necessary,” Edward said. He felt the press will always be open to publishing anthologies when “there's a conversation that needs to happen.”

“I’ve always believed books can create conversations that might not happen otherwise. My hope is that readers don't come away agreeing with every piece. I hope they come away thinking. Feeling. Sitting with ideas that maybe make them a little uncomfortable. That's what good literature has always done.”

Anger is a Gift can be ordered directly from Flowersong Press (link), Libromobile (link), and your local indie bookseller. Priced to move at $17.00, Flowersong Press offers a three-payment deal to acquire Anger is a Gift, details at the publisher's website (click).

Book Review: Nilda by Nicholasa Mohr

Nilda: Ground-Breaking Book by Nicholasa Mohr

Reviewed by Thelma T. Reyna

Nicholasa Mohr (b. 1938) has been described as the most prolific and renowned Puerto Rican-American novelist. Born and raised in the Bronx, New York, she represents the “Nuyorican” writers (“New York Puerto Ricans”), a group that first rose to national prominence for their considerable talents in the 20th century. Puerto Ricans officially became American citizens in 1917.

Mohr grew up in the 1940’s, with World War II a gauzy backdrop, and suffered the proverbial slings and arrows of prejudice and discrimination. With the well-received publication of NILDA in 1974, however, she cemented her place in American literature as one of the earliest American Latinos to publish her writings in English in the United States and one of the first to write a young adult book in English.

Mainstream America at that time had little interest in publications about Latinos. But Nilda successfully crossed the divide. Since 1974, Mohr has been the most productive and renowned Nuyorican novelist, earning major awards and publishing in a variety of genres: novels, short stories, novellas, and nonfiction. Her influence in other authors’ development has been significant, not just through her 15 published books, but also through her workshops and university teaching.

NILDA recounts the life of a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx from 1941 through 1945, as seen through the viewpoint of the only daughter in the family and the youngest child, Nilda. Her family is poor, large, and as diverse in personality and outlook as her neighborhood. But these nine people, with their varying degrees of dysfunction and tension, are the source of stability and love that enable Nilda to navigate her childhood intact. She, as well as other Puerto Ricans, regularly encounters naked racism and marginalization, often at the hands of teachers and other authority figures who should, paradoxically, be protecting and nurturing her. Through it all, Nilda is alternately petulant and carefree, defiant and obedient, aloof and moved to tears, frightened and resolute. She exhibits the resilience of her mother and moves forward.

Nilda, as a pioneering novel, captures the unique cultural experiences of New York’s Puerto Ricans in the 1940’s and thereby secures a solid place in the history of our literature. It still resonates decades later because its cultural depictions of family, love, individual pride, and resilience in the face of hardship still matter.

Order from Libromobile or the publisher.

https://artepublicopress.com/browse-and-order-books/?swoof=1&woof_text=nilda

[Note: Originally published in March 26, 2012, in a prior version, in Jesus Trevino’s  Latinopia, www.Latinopia.com]

Look Back: La Bloga's First Book Review

Note: November 28 marks the 21st anniversary of the first La Bloga column. To observe this notable event in the history of Chicana Chicano Literature--La Bloga is the Universe's oldest continuously published literary y más blog--La Bloga-Tuesday re-runs a pair of Penelope-themed book reviews. (2006, Atwood; 2013 Villanueva)

With these two-reviews-in-one celebration, La Bloga launches a series reviewing classic and other highly-regarded works.

Review: Margaret Atwood. The Penelopiad. NY: Canongate, 2005. ISBN 1-84195-717-8.

Michael Sedano

Devotees of the great writers of American literature may find it unseemly to say someone "stumbled across" a Margaret Atwood title, but that's what I did recently when I picked up the north-of-the-border novelist's The Penelopiad. 

Atwood nearly always leaves me reeling in delight, as she did in The Handmaid's Tale and The Robber Bride. But because I had not much enjoyed Oryx and Crake–found it obscure and a small deviation from the writer's usual quality–I wasn't looking for another title of hers when my eyes caught the thin (198 pages) spine's almost illegible title, then noted the writer's name. 

What a grand idea, telling Penelope's story! For thousands of years, people have celebrated Odysseus. The Iliad's nine years fighting the Trojan war, then the trickster's own story of the long sail home, only to find his household in thrall to treasure-seekers. 

Penelope's is the backstory. Crafty Odysseus' equally crafty spouse spinning a cloak during the day, then unravelling it during the night as a strategem to hold off the greedy suitors' demands.

Atwood will have none of this backstory stuff, starting the tale with the 15 year old girl on her wedding day wondering which of the contestants would win her, then fleshing out the story of a lonely girl in a foreign city, an uncaring suegra, a bossy handmaiden and a chorus of the hanged. Homer's story winds to a close with Odysseus and Telemachus wreaking revenge on the suitors. 

After the slaughter, twelve slave girls, identified as collaborators, are assigned to clean up the blood and gore, then taken outside and hanged. But the story of the hanged slaves intrigues Atwood, and she builds the tale around them. As the writer observes in her foreward: "the maids form a chanting and singing Chorus which focuses on two questions that must pose themselves after any close reading of The Odyssey: what led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to? The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water: there are too many inconsistencies. I've always been haunted by the hanged maids; and, in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself." (xv) 

The heuristic of building a novel from a cherished myth is the idea behind the publisher's myth series. In addition to Atwood's work, Canongate recruited Chinua Achebe, AS Byatt, and others to delve into old stories in new ways. Atwood relishes the retelling. There's Penelope in Hades, remembering various heroes trekking in search of answers, blooding a beast into a trench, then, "Once the right number of words had been handed over to the hero we'd all be allowed to drink from the trench, and I can't say much in praise of the table manners on such occasions." 

Pity the reader devoid the classics, they'll miss so much fun: "Odysseus had been in a fight with a giant one-eyed Cyclops, said some; no, it was only a one-eyed tavern keeper, said another, and the fight was over non-payment of the bill." The story of the twelve--thirteen, actually, according to Atwood--hanged slavegirls, along with Penelope's satisfaction hearing that Helen looked old during a visit by Telemachus to Meneleus' court, shows the fun a writer can enjoy when imagination runs freely through classic texts, plots, and characters.

Finding a Voice for Penelope 

Review: Tino Villanueva. So Spoke Penelope. Cambridge MA: Grolier Poetry Press, 2013. ISBN: 9781891592027 1891592025 

The woman approached me in the hall, outside the seminar at the New York Sheraton, book in hand. Now I’m generally not open to hallway sales pitches, but the law of Zeus Xenia requires fairness to strangers, so I let her engage me. It is the best hallway conversation I can remember. 

The woman had brought along a single copy of Hay Otra Voz Poems by Tino Villanueva. 

No, I admitted, I was not familiar with the poetry nor the poet. I flipped through the artisan-crafted pages that just covered the palm of my hand, scanning a line or two. Yes. Yes, wow. Spanish, English, mezcla. Then I read one at random, “Aquellos Vatos.” An instant classic, I had to own this volume. 

That was 1972 or maybe 1973.

Today, Villanueva comes forth with another instant classic of chicano literature, So Spoke Penelope. Published in a limited edition of only 800 copies, the slim volume of 60 pages presents 36 one- and two-page meditations Odysseus’ wife consoles herself with over the 20 years her husband went missing in the Trojan War.

Calculating Penelope’s age to be nineteen when her husband sails off to war, the woman ages across the poems until, at the eve of her fortieth year, her story reunites with Odysseus’ in a bloodbath that isn’t mentioned in Penelope’s rapture and falling into bed with her long-absent lover. 

Readers will enjoy the sweep of years that creates a poetic plot in Penelope’s biography. Villanueva picks moments of thought at 5 years, then six, ten, eighteen, twenty years, to illustrate Penelope’s determination to wait out the painful absence.

Homer didn’t know Puccini, but Villanueva certainly does. When certain images recall un bel di, it comes as an irony that the smoke Butterfly seeks on the horizon will bring only tragedy, while the sails Penelope longs to see will fulfill the three motives that Villanueva has invested her with, seething passion, desperate patience, and good wife faithfulness.

It’s curious that “home” is a rarely-visited thought throughout the collection. Penelope wants Odysseus back, wants to be wrapped in his passionate arms, wants him in bed, in Ithaca, wants to see his sails on the horizon. All that wanting, longing and absence, yet Penelope’s vocabulary rarely mentions “home.” Only in the sixth year of wanting does the word enter Penelope’s vocabulary.

“Home” implies permanence and resolution, qualities Penelope cannot grasp because she’s stuck in a world of ever-shifting never-satisfied wants and hopes, seemingly at the mercy of gods and goddesses that have already mucked up her world. So she weaves.

Villanueva writes for readers familiar with the Odyssey, rewards their knowledge with a rich tapestry of allusions, and dramatic ironies pointing to the larger context of world literature. Penelope wonders if Odysseus has taken up with another woman, not knowing how Kirke seduced her husband on the other side of this story. Penelope wonders if Odysseus has been captured, and the reader thinks how crafty polytropos used a word game to blind the one-eyed Cyclops and escape captivity.

At their most elemental level, So Spoke Penelope speaks love poetry. Richly textured from classical literature, each piece nonetheless stands on its own. Each poem deserves to be taken for itself, read one at a time, in any order. They stay with one, these poems, long after closing the book.

So Spoke Penelope is under translation now for Spanish and French readers, and possibly Hangul. From Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad now to Tino Villanueva’s romantic exploration, after 2500 years or so, it’s good seeing Penelope coming into her own. Visit the Grolier on-line bookshop to order your copies.

Review: Some Final Beauty

 …and Other Stories

Review: Lisa Alvarez. Some Final Beauty And Other Stories. Reno and Las Vegas. U of Nevada Press, 2025.

Michael Sedano

Laurie, the miscreant working off her community service sentence, in the first story, "Everyone Was Singing 'Freiheit,'" struggles against empathy for the gente in the church building where the priest easily detects Laurie’s attempt to cheat the sentence by claiming to be in two places at the same time. “Bilocation,” the priest tells her, is something only a few Catholic saints managed.

The abashed Laurie is no saint yet despite her self-involvement and ennui, she cares about an old guy left behind after an earthquake evacuation. When old Max dies, Laurie walks off into the sunset with ambiguity in her wake. The reader wonders, will Laurie go straight or remain in her current state of suspended animation between her past and the unstated future? 

The opening story prepares readers to have a high tolerance for ambiguity. Laurie's struggle between her better self and her damaged persona defines a constant unspoken theme in Lisa Alvarez’ eleven stories of challenged women, crummy men, good men, hopeful women, in various forms of bilocation, constrained by present circumstances. 

Alvarez liberates some characters by giving them a future that resolves past circumstance, freeing others in their present time in leaps of perception and insight.

Alvarez doesn’t like to spell out endings, preferring to leave stories hanging in ambiguity or unfinished, both constituting varieties of bilocational perception. Does she, or doesn’t she? Can the past be like the present that was the future back then?

Psychological and emotional portraiture, together with keen attention to tiny details, blend with lightly concealed roman à clef portrayals to make reading Some Final Beauty (link) lots of fun, even in the face of the enormity of some people’s behavior.

The book’s second story, “A Pretty Penny,” introduces another running theme, social and neighborly activism. Robyn and June struggle to live as lesbians and that doesn’t work out—Robyn moves along to Isla Vista, a UCSB degree, a husband and kids. June stays in LA, disappointing her father that she is a “cultural worker”. The work doesn’t pay enough to pay the rent, so she lives by working numerous odd jobs.

One night, June sees a group of taggers across the street whose labor sends the woman into a reverie of the night she and Robyn tagged “War is Menstruation Envy” on a Federal building wall. She bounces back and forth from her now to her then, the unbothered kids spraying, Robyn and June on the lookout.

Many of the men in Alvarez’ collection are shits. There’s Cody, the fentanyl pusher at his victim’s funeral. There’s an unpleasant actor whose teevee persona matches his behavior in a restaurant. When the place can’t serve his wants he whines and embarrasses his two daughters. I’m not a teevee watcher, but I can see a balding unpleasant whiner in the, perhaps, eponymous role as himself.

A more telling roman à clef story pictures a lightly disguised Joan Baez and Antonio Villaraigosa. In an understated and sufficiently vicious take-down, the mayor begins the story hoping to talk the singer down from a black walnut tree. Alvarez paints a favorable up from nothing political success story for the mayor, before the reader sees him as a self-interested hypocrite whose interest lies not in rescuing his idealized folksinger but in repairing his crumbling public image. He used to be an ése and now he’s an object. Topping it off, he’s a philanderer who’s as likely to drive home to his wife, as to his upscale apartment in the Valley where his Sancha awaits.

Alvarez’ penultimate story, “False Flag” pulls readers in two directions. Linda, a sympathetic single mother, lives next door to a curmudgeonly man, a “gruff but reliable neighbor, who performs good deeds on one face, acts a total jerk on another. Is Matthew just another crank or a crypto hater?

Linda realizes the wingnut neighbor was at the Capitol on January 6. She reports him to the FBI who show up and arrest the scum. With him absent—in a good way while so many other men in other stories absent themselves in dastardly ways—Linda’s child Willow will care for the hens left behind. “We need the eggs,” Linda laughs, not guilty at all at fingering the traitor (my word.)

Eleven stories, eleven lives bouncing against their own histories, battered by circumstances, some escaping, other characters stuck in one place—maybe stuck; the author won’t tell. Lisa Alvarez' collection makes an enjoyable read that you can consume in a single sitting then leaf through to remember great phrases and characterizations, nod at familiar places and recent historical events, and share with friends and writers who enjoy seeing how it’s done, and done well.

Hot Tip For Arte Lovers!

Art enthusiast takes a 'selfie' with Linda Arreola (center) and Abel Alejandre

Saturday, September 6 arrived with hard decisions. There is a Judithe Hernandez exhibition, Rick Ortega in another venue, Will Loya at Avenue 50's new location, and, my choice, Linda Arreola at LAUNCH gallery in Hollywood.

Arreola's finely wrought architectural abstracts reflect a keen eye, steady hand, imaginative uses of color and respect for her neighborhoods, like the foto here, Arreola's celebration Eastern Avenue that borders Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles, the heart of Chicana Chicano LA. 

Paintings and sculptures fascinate viewers in this compact exhibition space at 170 S. La Brea, Los Angeles 90036. 

Be forewarned, Siri may direct you to Inglewood where there's a 170 S. La Brea. That is not where arte happens, it's a vacant structure near a good Soul Food restaurant. The real Launch LA is a short drive from Hollywood Blvd and Musso and Frank restaurant.

Coming to La Bloga-Tuesday: El Gluten-free Chicano and Guest Chefs

Gluten-free dining becomes problematic when restaurant staff don't know their ingredients. Cross-contamination looms as a constant threat to safe dining. Home cooking the only way to enjoy wondrous cuisine and feel entirely safe and content.

La Bloga-Tuesday will offer menus and recipes to please any palate and diner, even those who tremble at the words, "gluten-free." Next week launches the first in the series. 

Narco and Knuckleheads: Satire On La Frontera

Is Getting Kidnaped in Mexico Comedy?

Review: José Skinner. The Search Committee. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2025.

Michael Sedano

José Skinner had me fooled. The opening pages of his first novel, The Search Committee, evoke pleasant memories of Richard Russo’s Straightman, and James Hynes’ Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror. I thought The Search Committee would be like these, a delightful satire on academia and small minds. I was partially right.

The Search Committee is a satire on academia and small minds, but the darned plot doesn’t entirely delight. I had to slog through my impatience at the novel's small minds and the awful stupidities Skinner concocts to drive his plot from funny-peculiar to totally bizarre outlandishness.

In the end, it’s all in fun and a romp through serious issues treated without an ounce of seriousness.

And what fun. An ABD  out of University of New Mexico lands an interview at a backwater Texas school, Bravo U (like the Rio Bravo), once a JC now a fully-fledged University. Quigley, the junior member of the search committee, is charged with meeting Minerva, or Minnie, Mondragón, at the airport, ferry her to lunch, then scoot off to school for her interview.

Instead of a few tacos at a local joint, they drive the 8 miles to the bridge, cross into México, and Minnie gets kidnapped, setting off a comedy of errors that start with Quigley abandoning the candidate and fashioning a lie that mushrooms into fragile lies that could explode at any moment, but The Search Committee’s a comedy, not an exercise in keen logic and credulity.

Minnie escapes and gets recaptured and back in la sequestrada with other women. But kidnapping a Unitedstatesian breaks certain rules, and a squad of armed men busts up the sequestrada and Minnie is free of the original kidnappers but is now held by the son of a fearsome narco boss. Minerva and the boss’ son fall into bed. But the son gets word Minnie is a CIA or DEA spy.

She’s not, but there are spies at work and, ironically, that’s what gets the hostage sprung. Back in the USA, Minnie’s having none of the crap that seems to await her. The novel ends with Minnie turning the tables on Quigley, her dissertation adviser, Bravo, and Homeland Security. She'll take the money and run.

Bizarre outlandishness is fun. The slow parts aside, a reader will forgive the blatant flaws in The Search Committee plot, relax and give into a willing suspension of absolute incredulity and let Skinner take the reins, leading readers into a wild romp along la frontera. 

Review of Blues for the Buffalo, Backyard Floricanto Returns to Casa Reyna, Jorge Martin qepd

 An Old Friend Through New Eyes

Review: Manuel Ramos. Blues for the Buffalo. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2025. ISBN: 979-8-89375-008-9

Michael Sedano

If you were reading detective fiction in 1994, you were excited by publication of a new Manuel Ramos novel, Blues for the Buffalo, featuring a Denver Chicano lawyer-detective malgre lui, Luis Montez. 

That was forty years ago, so it’s likely many readers are meeting Luis Montez for the first time, and today’s readers are excited by publication of the fourth in the Luis Montez series from Houston’s Arte Público Press. (link), Blues for the Buffalo. 

For gente who get a summer vacation, the four-volume Luis Montez series is perfect for summer binge reading. The series offers not simply four brown noir mysteries but more arrestingly, Ramos crafts a distinctive character in Luis Montez whose ethos occupies a central focus of Blues for the Buffalo.

Not that the novel lacks action and murder and clues and supporting characters. Ramos always fills his books with rich portions of all the above. Blues for the Buffalo, for all its insights into what makes Luis tick, has a fire-bombing murder, a gruesome hit-and-run, a shot in the dark, a bad guy getting it from Luis’ father.

Blues for the Buffalo introduces a California private detective character, Rad Valdez. Rad’s an ass-kicker and no Chicano but he’s got a semi-open mind about raza identity. Valdez is like a proxy for the modern reader who doesn’t “get” the title allusion to Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Brown Buffalo, and gives Ramos a platform to teach some history. This isn't dry stuff; it's like listening to oldies on remastered vinyl.

Oscar Acosta reads from his
Autobiography of a 
Brown Buffalo, 1973

There's no disclaimer like,“Any similarity to actual poets and Yo Soy Joaquin are strictly co-incidental,” but there could be. And there’s a sly smile behind that in the novel’s allusion to Denver poet and movimiento activist Rodolfo Corky Gonzales, who authored the movimiento anthemic ballad, Yo Soy Joaquin. That part’s not in the novel but what’s an allusion for if you have to spell out everything, que no?

Ramos isn’t raising pedo for its own sake. The book's fictive authorship is possibly a motive for murder and just desserts. The poetry subplot lets author Ramos riff on the literary life, flamboyant writers, and signing tables.

Manuel Ramos dedicates Blues for the Buffalo to Zeta, “For Zeta c/s”. Ramos is careful not to embellish or lionize the Los Angeles lawyer and writer in the novel's lengthy expositions about Chicano history and the place Oscar Acosta holds. 

The Brown Buffalo’s a kind of red herring--the book isn't really about Zeta, and the legendary activist is used as a fraud perpetrated upon a fragile woman by an evil half-brother. Evil is a word that dare not speak its name, in the story behind why the woman goes missing and the search leads to a Molotov cocktail and death of a good woman.

Readers who’ve seen Montez take too many risks and make dumb decisions that get him shot in the leg and have his legal practice come crashing down on him will find Buffalo’s Montez a breath of fresh air. Luis is earning a meagre living as a reinstated lawyer again. Slowed down by the leg, he’s introspective and sensitive. Ramos gives the character numerous ethos-fashioning soliloquies on urban change, the movimiento, conscientiousness, being a good son.

Like all the Luis Montez novels, Ramos juggles several plot threads whose characters pop in and out of chapters. As a favor to readers, halfway through Blues for the Buffalo, the author offers a thumbnail summary, “now it appeared that Rad’s presence in town had something to do with the fire that had claimed the life of Charlotte Garcia. And somewhere in all that, I had to sort out the killing of my client, Wilson López, and the unlikely linkage between the poet, Bobby Baca, and the small-time hood Chick Montero.”

All that gets sorted, raveled, and unraveled in good time, along with an untied loose thread about the missing woman and the ugly motive behind the woman’s disappearance and the chain of tragedies leading out of the search for a missing daughter, sister, family secret.

Summer is icumin in and that’s when gente who get vacation time like to kick back and read. Arte Publico’s making binge-reading the Luis Montez series an ideal way to do just that, kick back and read. You’ll enjoy the noir sensibility Manuel Ramos infuses into his novels, clever writing, plot twists you don’t see until they hit you in the gut, entertaining characters and despicable bad guys.

If you’re a working stiff who doesn’t get time off and have to sneak in a book only now and again, there’s nothing like a good mystery novel to distract from the crap and daily drudge. A Luis Montez mystery novel like Blues for the Buffalo brings just what you need to chase away your own blues and if you’re up on your movimiento history, it’ll bring smiles to your face. Y si no, here's a free lesson that anti-DEI tipos don't want you to have.

Backyard Floricanto Returns to Casa Reyna Poetry Garden

La Bloga has long championed the home-grown floricanto, a literary uprising in a living room or backyard. Festivales de Flor y Canto take place on big stages attracting whomever gets the word. Back in 2010, Michael Sedano organized a reunion floricanto of the first major floricanto at USC in 1973. Both festivals were three-day celebrations of Chicano Literature.

These were big deals but floricantos don’t have to be, and should not be, restricted to the big stage. Everyday gente can put together a guest list of poets, send out invitations, and get together in the living room or back yard to eat, drink, and share an open mic with fellow writers and invitadas invitados.

Poets and writers in the Altadena-Pasadena and neighboring communities enjoy the generosity and hospitality of Thelma Reyna, laureate emerita of Altadena, whose poetry garden makes a personal setting for an afternoon floricanto. This was the case last year, when Richard Vargas featured at Casa Reyna Poetry Garden. Link. 

This year, Reyna, with co-host Michael Sedano, welcomed the year’s first floricanto featuring Roy Kuchel and Karineh Mahdessian. 

A floricanto can be fully experienced only in public. This foto essay, however, captures moments of sublime joy wrought from sharing by the afternoon’s features and open mic readers. Iphone fotos by Michael Sedano, art directed/curated by Thelma T. Reyna.

Host, Thelma T. Reyna

It's not all poetry. Margaret García canta.

Alicia Viguer-Espert

Toti O'Brien reads then later sings a song.

John Martinez

Donald Berry

Jimmy Recinos

Mary Anee Berry moves the audience with a fire poem.
Casa Reyna is two blocks south of the Eaton Fire's reach.

G.T. Foster reads from his Vietnam-era memoir 

One of the day's feature poets, Karineh Mahdessian

Karineh Mahdessian makes her return to a poetry stage
in today's Floricanto

Leading the spotlighted readers, Roy Kuchel

Roy Kuchel made his poetry debut at one of last year's
Backyard Floricantos at Casa Reyna Poetry Garden

Remembering Jorge Martin

In 2018, Casa Sedano hosted author liz gonzalez in a book release Living Room Floricanto for her Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds (link). It was a joyous celebration with friends and familia for the San Bernardino native. Last week, liz gonzalez celebrated the life of her husband, scientist, musician, cancer patient Jorge Martin.

liz is surrounded by writer friends in the foto below. The display behind them tells Jorge's life story in a series of tee shirts. There is joy in sorrow, and the Jorge Martin Celebration of Life brought both in equal measure. Jorge's spirit lives on in memories of him held close to the hearts of Jorge's and liz' friends and familia. 

liz begins life after caregiving stops. La Bloga wishes liz the joy of finding the new life awaiting discovery.

Poetry In Beautiful Burbank

Colloquy, Reading, Online Floricanto

Michael Sedano 

Two o’clock on a Friday afternoon makes an ideal hour to start a poetry reading, and with poets Alicia Viguer-Espert in tandem with Nancy Murphy, La Bloga gladly takes a seat in the Buena Vista Branch of Burbank Public Library. 

We enjoy an hour-plus of engaging dialogue and astounding poetry between the poets, then a Q&A with responsive listeners. And we're home before dark. Órale to the planners.

The hour comes as a feature in Reader Engagement Librarian Kyle Moreno’s service to the library’s mission. It’s an active poetry program with longevity; for example, in June 2024, La Bloga attended an early iteration of a conversation/reading, "Writing from Our Immigrant Hearts." (link. The innovative panel reading will be published in book form in the near future, details to follow.)

Viguer-Espert and Murphy’s mutual interview blending poetry performance offers this audience a satisfying listening and learning experience. Hearing superbly written and expressed work is the raison d’être for attending a poetry hour, and the poets not only fulfill but surpass expectations for sublime writing. More, colloquy of two minds into the discovery of subjects, disclosure,  and other vital elements of the poetry writing process, enriches the readings. The poets’ talk informs and sharpens insight into poems of empty places, absence, distance and separation.

The poets granted La Bloga-Tuesday permission to share a poem from the Friday reading to accompany the portraits captured during the readings.

 Alicia Viguer-Espert

She Lifts Her Burka 

By Alicia Viguer-Espert

I wonder how tough this young Kabul woman has it. This woman who shows me her lovely fifteen years old face, polished nails bright red, and the green eyes of a 1985 National Geographic cover. A youth already betrothed to a man three times her age, a friend of her father’s, luckily with only one wife, she whispers. Leaning on the noise of a building’s façade to hide her dismay, or protect herself from viewers, she pushes her chaperone’s hands as they try to pull the burka back. At home family prepares Halwa and praises God for the engagement. Nervous, asks about life in Europe, if I am allowed to dance until sunrise, how often women die in childbirth, whether I am married, and if my husband beats me. With the last question her smile disappears. I survey the snowy ridges circling us like rapacious birds starving for prey in that frigid December morning. He’s a good man, maybe he’ll let me go back to school, she says frowning.

I think about her often, her beauty, youth, pray fate will treat her with enough benevolence to raise healthy, educated children. She wouldn’t have had a chance, untrained as she was, but her daughters did before the Taliban. Now icy clouds of misery engulf the city, women sit around clanky kerosene stoves without kerosene, debate the dangers of defying the jailers to have a life of their own, or else. 

a bright light

fades fast

under the burka

Nancy Murphy

                                                                                   

 

All that Bergamot*

By Nancy Murphy

We are on our way from LA to Zion, 

the one in Utah. We stop in Hemet, 

 

the desert, a Starbucks. I need a midday 

lift. A man sits in a battered wheelchair 

 

by the entrance, no hat. It’s 102 degrees. 

His clothes an assembly of fabrics 

 

the color of an espresso he can’t afford. 

Sunburnt leathered face, patches 

 

of a beard, he was a blonde once. He was 

a lot of things once. I motion Brian 

 

to avoid walking past him. It’s just

a reflex. Not personal. Inside the cool 

 

café I order my usual–tea latte 

with English Breakfast tea, not

 

Earl Grey (all that bergamot!), 

soy milk for its sweet vanilla traces,

 

one Splenda, something I hope 

doesn’t kill me one day if they find

 

it causes cancer. But I’ve tried to quit

and I just can’t. As I wait I notice 

 

how I’m still able to make eye contact 

with strangers even with our masks on.

 

I think, we are all learning to use 

our eyes more. Humans are a wonder. 

 

The man outside the door comes into my mind. 

No one looks him in the eye. Sympathy floods

 

me, and some shame. But what does that buy? 

Even so, I resolve to give him something, 

 

and to ask him something. I say nothing 

as we exit. He turns towards us, the usual pitch 

 

beginning, Hey do you….I lurch forward, 

drop some bills into his lap so I don’t 

 

have to touch his hands, because, well 

covid of course. Then I pause, lean in, take in 

 

his face. I say, What’s your name?

He startles, squints, replies, What’s my name?

 

I turn quickly now with a small wave, 

mumble goodbye, hurry on to the car, 

 

flushed from the heat, the moment. 

Brian stands waiting, holding the door 

 

open for me, a habit he can’t break, 

a habit that makes me impatient. I’m 

 

ungrateful like that.    Then I hear 

a voice calling out behind me.            

 

Floyd.  My name is Floyd.

 

* The characteristic flavor of Earl Grey tea comes from the addition of bergamot. 

Rocky Ruiz Endures: The Second Time Around

Review: Manuel Ramos. The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz. Houston: Arte Publico, 2023.(link to publisher)

 Michael Sedano

Re-reading a mystery novel is the same as reunion with a friend you've not seen in ages. From page one into the heart of the story, it's like all those years never separated us. But then, after a while, into chapter 4 or maybe it strikes around chapter 8, you notice how that old friend has a few wrinkles you didn't see before, and new twists you had not considered as a younger reader.

 

The more you hang out together your friendship gains dimensions formed out of newer friendships-- many of these subsequent titles by the same author. 

Right before your reading eyes, your old friend divides into two personae: the friend you remember from first-reading, a version frozen in time, it remains unchanged; the friend you're seeing now with new, older, eyes. Now you see stuff you hadn't noticed and maybe some stuff you didn't like so much but you're glad to see it. Most of all, it's grand to be back together again.

 

Meet my old friend, The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz. I met the vato in 1993, from St. Martin's Press. Then Rocky gets a new life in 2004 from Northwestern University Press. Clearly, my old carnal has a strong life force because now, Arte Publico Press has republished The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz, Manuel Ramos' first detective book, the book that gives Ramos the honorific title, "the godfather of Chicano noir." (Readers interested in the father and mother of the genre will seek out Rudolfo Anaya and Lucha Corpi).

 

The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz introduces a burned-out lawyer whose movimiento activism comes to haunt him 30 years later. Old friends Montez sees from time to time come into his life and as we go from chapter to chapter, Luis Montez begins seeing wrinkles on those old carnales and pretty soon everything turns to puro chaos. When the dust settles, the bodies buried, the suspects fingered, Montez is the one left standing. The once-broken lawyer has shed his disillusionment and emerges renewed, and rededicated to the world of work and his next four plots.

 

Ramos got himself a good character in Luis Montez. He's a big pendejo in a lot of ways and here's what strikes me reading as a 78 year old widower: That young Chicana lawyer was too young for you, Luis. She played you and that's how you came this close to losing it all. Like a total pendejo, Montez smiles at the memories of the alluring Teresa, and doesn't look back, even as he realizes he knew the woman as a baby when Montez the activist has a desperate adulterous afternoon with the baby's mother.

 

Montez' world offers a mélange of murder, sex, intrigue, betrayal, a narc, brown beret phonies, corrupt real estate tipos, opportunists, and one of the funniest courtroom scenes in literature. Laugh, pendejo. The comedy nearly costs Montez his license in a tour de force by the writer Ramos, who weaves a seemingly extraneous bit of local color into the hero's most serious threat and the novel's highest bit of suspense: will the Bar yank his license?

 

Readers know it's a yarn and Montez will work his way out of the murder and crime morass. But in noir fiction, there's the possibility of pyrrhic wins when forces outside the central plot wreak havoc. Like Teresa, febrile sexiness becomes a mujeriego's special memory: Teresa hatched that diabolical plot, did she shoot Tino? That time she points the pistol at Montez' heart, does horniness save the dirty old man? 

 

Questions of dirty old men aside, Luis is one and that makes him easy pickings for the crusading Teresa. First time I read the novel, I missed this in my identifying with Montez. Teresa's a gem Manuel Ramos needs to polish. The woman, whom Luis knew as a little girl, beds Luis as a tactic in her campaign to uncover her father's murderer. While Teresa develops a soft spot for the old guy, that could be a fluke. Let's find out: Teresa needs a series of novels that set her loose upon the world.

 

Fans of detective fiction and Chicano Literature will want to order copies of the Ramos oeuvre as AP reprints the titles. There's time if you order from the link below, right now, to get copies of The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz for this holiday season. 

 

https://artepublicopress.com/product/the-ballad-of-rocky-ruiz/=

Throwing the Book At Mexican Muralists

Review: Roberto Cantú, Ed. Mexican Mural Art Critical Essays On A Belligerent Aesthetic. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK. 2021.  

ISBN(10): 1- 5275-6224-7

Michael Sedano

 

 

Editor Roberto Cantú’s Mexican Mural Art Critical Essays On A Belligerent Aesthetic, arrives as a singularly important book for a quintessential American readership that includes arte professionals like scholars and artists, students, collectors, hasta language students, will gravitate to the collection, not alone for its subject matter but to appreciate Cantú’s unique cohort of scholars who write in English, or Spanish, or both when citing freely in untranslated quotations. Each idioma stands on its own, y que?

 

I don’t know if textual inclusiveness like this makes the book belligerent like the arte, but readers comfortable en ambos idiomas of north American linguistic pluralism will appreciate the editor’s matter-of-course approach to language pluralism. Let the essay speak its own language, translation unnecessary; Mexican Mural Art, after all, is a United States book published in England about Mexican arte featuring scholars from Mexico and the United States.

 

English monolinguals won’t be excluded from gaining general understanding of the entire set of essays, owing to editor Cantú’s exhaustive Introduction. Cantú weaves an historical narrative linking the essays with historiographic and aesthetic contexts. A constrained reader might cherry-pick the body of the collection by letting the Introduction offer its keen précis of the scholarship.

 

You want an “executive summary” of Mexican Mural Art? Read the Introduction.

 

One beauty of the book also offers a blemish. The publisher needs to lavish a few euros or pesos or dollars on an aggressive illustration program for this book about murals. A book about murals shouldn’t have a paucity of illustrations, and at that, low-resolution black and white images with no color plates. 

 

There’s a solution, of course, to © and licensing and lawyers: the web. 

 

When, for example, where Mary Coffey describes a segment of the Orozco Dartmouth mural, “It culminates in a highly unorthodox scene of Christian Apocalypse in which a mortified Christ chops down his own cross and thereby refuses to redeem the civilization created in his name”, a hyperlink to a ©-cleared, or fair-use, image gives that text stunning impact.

https://www.dartmouth.edu/digitalorozco/

Leonard Folgarait’s essay, “Thinking Mexican Muralism through Still and Moving Photography” illustrates the inherent problem with “the web” in a text resource like a chapter in a book. Folgarait dutifully documents his images via footnotes that include permalinks-as-text. Readers eager to see what we're talking about will be typing out 100 weird characters on just that one footnote!

Hyperlinks aside, Mexican Mural Art offers accessible, useful, reading. For the most part, the Conference provenance of the works leads essayists to employ a colloquial style, first person in many instances. In other instances, there’s an argumentative stance, less the critic’s dispassion and more the voice of a seminar speculation finding solid ground. The published words keep the liveliness of a conference talk. Thanks to Editor Cantú’s expectations, the scholar whipped those remarks and talking outline into something publishable.

 

Mostly. My comprehension has to depend on Cantú’s account of Fernando Curiel Defossé’s, “El Ateneo Muralista,” which is written in Spanish. I do not recognize the structure of the essay, and have no idea what’s going on. Cantú explains:

 

“A historian who knows the history of Mexico by heart, a literary critic, poet, and radio announcer, Curiel Defossé draws from different fields and a variety of topics related to Mexican muralism, guiding the reader through apparently distant or unrelated accounts that nonetheless cohere at the end. The essay’s mural-like composition, with a variety of interpretations of the history of Mexican art and post-revolutionary Mexico is traced with evident mastery of the subject at times formulated through satire, irony, or understatement so as to encourage the reader to think critically and independently.”  

 

The 2019 Conference must have been a highlight of an academician’s year. The essays look like the scholar had fun writing, you’ll have fun reading. I like to think of the sweep of the collection, alternating from language to language, man to woman, akin to watching a one-camera b&w film of a live staged production.  You didn’t have to be there to get it, but it must have been something in person!

 

Adding to the accessibility of the collection is the scholars’ motive to revisit and newly-explore accepted ideas, maybe turn something on its coco. As Cantú avers, the propósito of the collection is to revisit comfortable ideas.

 

“Studies of this scope are evidence that Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros, including other Mexican muralists, were caught in an international network of interests and conflicts from day one, often beyond their comprehension or control. Such is the aim of the essays selected for this volume: to propose alternative theoretical and critical perspectives on Mexican mural art, distinguishing between aesthetics and its relation to beauty and taste, and the aesthetic Mexican muralists sided with: belligerently against “bourgeois” taste in art; against capitalism; against the Mexican government (e.g. the Calles regime), against Stalinism, against Trotskyism and, at times, against each other.”

 

As they cover old, familiar ground, being responsible scholars, they take nothing for granted. The essays don’t assume a deep knowledge of the cultural and historical milieu of the periods in ferment, hence added usefulness.

 

Re-envisioning ways to assess and understand renowned, well-loved classic murals, and explain your ideas even to well-informed tipos, demands deep background to place historical context  around ideas discovered in murals. The essays assume an informed reader. The scholars own up to a responsibility to give readers a good history lesson, especially the anglophone audience. Maybe a Mexicano got all this in high school, but a United Statesian won’t have any idea which Mexican liberator cut down the nopalera and didn’t lie about it, or why Rivera painted Marx in a Mexican scene?

 

Diego Rivera, Palacio Nacional, CDMX