Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream

by Juan Felipe Herrera

Overview

From one of the prominent Chicano poets writing today comes a collection of poems to take your breath away. With dazzling speed and energy, Juan Felipe Herrera sends readers rocketing through verbal space in a celebration of the rhythms and textures of words that will make you want to shout, dance, and read out loud. Like a wild ride in a fast car, Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream moves at breakneck speed, a post-Lorca journey across the new millennium terrain. Words careen through space and time, through blighted urban landscapes, past banjos and bees, past AIDS faces and mad friars, past severed heads and steel-toed border-crosser boots.

To the rhythm of “The Blue Eyed Mambo that Unveils My Lover’s Belly”and the sounds of the Last Mayan Acid rock band, Herrera races through the hallucinations of a nation that remains just outside of paradise. With dazzling poems that roar from the darkest corners of our minds toward an ecstatic celebration of the lushness of language, Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream is a celebration of a world that is both sacred and cruel, a world of “Poesy Chicano style undone wild” by one of the most daring poets of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816533053
Publisher:	University of Arizona Press
Publication date:	11/01/2015
Series:	Camino del Sol
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	99
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Juan Felipe Herrera is a graduate of the Floricanto Generation of ’71, campesino migrant treks, and multimedia political theater experiments. He has founded percussion and jazz poetry ensembles, Chicano teatros, and poetry brigades, and has taken his various word troupes across the United States and into Mexico and Latin America for the last thirty years. He has served as editor of a number of groundbreaking small-press magazines such as Red Trapeze, El Tecolote Literario, Gato’s Journal, Bovine Interventions, and Citybender, and university reviews including Vórtice, Metamorfosis, and Naranjas y Nopales. He holds degrees from the University of California–Los Angeles, Stanford University, and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and he has received numerous awards for his writing. Recent prized novels include Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box and Downtown Boy. He is currently the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California–Riverside. He lives in Redlands, California, with his wife, the performance artist Margarita Robles.
 

Table of Contents

contents punk half panther punk half panther blood on the wheel blood on the wheel blood night cafe abandoned blood blood suites say blood man blood mouse manifesto blood sockets blood gang call blood from the native son blood tysons 2pac blood aztec blood sample chicken blood townships blood fourteen ezekiel's blood sugarman's blood (yeah, you) last blood words queen blood america my rice queens my rice queens this is the z border-lovin' & sinister one thousand strings of oblivion & a bucket of grave dirt a banjo you left unbridled with rage a bee head rests on my shoulder this semi-skull worker the blue-eyed mambo that unveils my lover's belly blues pack last mile selena in corpus christi lacquer red pick up your severed head & let me get on, baby explode this letter w/ this edward hopper visits my el paso soul border-crosser with a lamborghini dream swish guitar for the abused federations slashed epistemology & wire cutters jute-boy at the naturalization derby gestapo bowls on the plank from an extinct ukraine, i sing broadway indian wixarika strip / from chinatown subzero kaliwey tatei border wire / spina stroke this locket scar kauyumari, i sing to you diaspora. night. notes for "broadway indian" we are all saying the same thing angel wrestler (with blond wig) simple poet constructs hunger young kuramoto lord jim five directions to my house i found myself in the studio of a tabla master we are all saying the same thing

What People are Saying About This

Benjamin Saenz

Using the cacophonous rhythms of urban life, Herrera indulges in a search for spiritual and political centers.... These poems are nothing short of miraculous.

Editorial Reviews

Anyone who thinks high art and performance poetry don't mix should re-read "Howl" and then pick up Herrera's latest, following 1994's Night Train to Tuxtla. Wryly drawing on our expectations of "ethnic" poetry ("my Neo-American uzzi mutations, my upgraded/ 2Pac thresholds"), Herrera performs the rare trick of simultaneously speaking from a self-aware, culturally marginalized perspective, while refusing to limit his poetic horizons--as in the tour-de-force opener "punk half panther": "Meet my barriohood, meet me/ with the froth i pick up everyday & everyday/ i wipe away with ablution & apologia & a smirk, then/ a smile on my Cholo-Millennium liberation jacket." As comfortable surfing the info-glut ("digital in its global suture ticktock of our existence") as in "the Kaliwey prayer house of the forgotten hope-shoe makers," Herrera's political salvos and satires can be surprisingly lyrical, as if not quite able to give up the idea of beauty: "You the King: you the tiger speaks the long grain hump, hear/ it sing to you, with a crooked guitar, wine colored string." This collection puts most academic poetry to shame, and, along with the work of poets like Luis Rodriguez, evidences an opening in the impasse between partisans of street-wise staccato and page-wise pleasure. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Herrera's writing has continually drawn attention to aspects of his people's heritage, whether it be the Barrio or the Maya. In Love After the Riots (LJ 4/1/96), Herrera proved himself capable of deep lyricism despite adverse circumstances, reminiscent perhaps of Neruda's The Captain's Verses (LJ 9/15/72). True to its title, Border-Crosser tackles legal and illegal immigration, America as the diaspora, and conflicting cultures, highlighted in the comic image of the immigrant "digging deep" in a boat filled with bananas, mangoes, plantains, and jalapenos. The poems in this volume are technically diverse, from the performance aspects of Herrera's readings and plays to long lines, incantations, and surrealism borrowed from the 1960s Beat poets. But diversity is not necessarily better. Despite certain reservations, there are enough gems in this collection--"lord jim" and "we are all saying the same thing" to name two--to make it well worth reading. Recommended especially for urban libraries.--Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York

Library Journal

"Herrera's political salvos can be surprisingly lyrical. . . . This collection puts most academic poetry to shame."—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher