On Tuesday, When the Homeless Disappeared

by Marcos McPeek Villatoro

Overview

Marcos McPeek Villatoro is not afraid to discuss mysteries, truths, or injustices. He has lived them. Poet and novelist, activist and radio personality, Villatoro writes poetry steeped in formalism, free verse, and his own Salvadoran syntax. This new collection is a memoir-in-poems telling how the world appears to a Latin American immigrant. His sense of humanity is intact. He has a family, a job, a life in the States. But the face of the Mayan hero Tekún Umán hangs in his office, and he has "made clear all political positions by standing behind the wooden mask of a dead man."

Villatoro is a writer with a keen political sensibility and a sense of humor besides. After confronting the reader with weighty issues, he pauses to have an encounter with a curandera in a cornfield; to speculate on a visit from extraterrestrials; and to pay tribute to his free-spirited, loose-living Uncle Jack, who "chewed forest mushrooms like a rabbit, / Then howled at a California night / While whispering querida above open thighs." Combining Borgean logic, the grit of Neruda, and a heady dose of Zen, Villatoro offers a primer on how to integrate a history of brutality and injustice with the privilege and comfort of life in America. A final section of poems is presented in Spanish only—a statement of ascendance, a strategy for identity preservation, a gift to the cognoscenti.

Reading On Tuesday, When the Homeless Disappeared may make you shift in your seat—perhaps even toss in your sleep—as you encounter a poignant human voice that is unafraid to speak from the heart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816523900
Publisher:	University of Arizona Press
Publication date:	09/01/2004
Series:	Camino del Sol
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.27(d)

Table of Contents

	Que seas razonable, cabron	1
	False Memory	3
	Interpretation	5
	On Tuesday, When the Homeless Disappeared	7
	The Odor	9
	Mask	11
	Zazen Interruptus	13
	Meditation	15
	To Enku	17
	The Familiar	19
	The Deer	21
	El Salvador, 1932-1981	25
	The Scold	29
	The Holy Spirit of My Uncle's Cojones	31
	The Snow	35
	Mother	37
	Skull Against the World	39
	The Cough	41
	Gotcha	43
	In the Hotel Room	45
	The Message	47
	The Landlady	49
	The Elders	51
	The Plan	57
	Mnemotics	59
	Entablar	61
	La hija	63
	Su pierna	65
	Vera Cruz, Mexico	67
	Fabiola	69
	Sin titulo	71
	Oda a Selena	73
	Sobreviviendo en Iowa	75
	La pinata	77
	Oda a Derrida	79
	La caceria	81
	El bisturi	83
	Oda al catarro	85
	End It	87