“However finally it is the subject of work, the hard life lived, the small triumphs over poverty and marginalization, that give this book its profound gravity and raise it far beyond where most first books can even hope to go. To be sure, these poems present a social conscience and consciousness, but the politics uncovered in any of these poems is ultimately a human politics, and is free of tired rhetoric, cant and boilerplate, a poetry that is never entangled in reductive ideology.”
                    —Christopher Buckley
                      from his introduction to The Date Fruit Elegies (forthcoming)
 
 
My Books
Aluminum Times
Swan Scythe Press, 2002

First place winner of the 2001 Swan Scythe Press Poetry Chapbook Contest
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize XXVIII

OUT OF PRINT
Gardeners of Eden
Chicano Chapbook Series, 2000
Limited Edition Chapbook with a print run of approximately 400.

This is #28 in the Series published by Gary Soto.

 

OUT OF PRINT

 

Anthologies I've Appeared In

The Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California

Greenhouse Review Press/Alcatraz Editions, 2008
Edited by Christopher Buckley and Gary Young.

Includes my prose poems “Mrs. Flores’ Oranges,” “No Weeds, No Work,” “Westbound,” and “The Trouble with Frankie Avila.” Also includes the essay, “Blood, Sweat, and Leaves: On the Writing of ‘No Weeds, No Work’”

 

 

The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry

University of Arizona Press, 2007
Edited by Francisco Aragón.

Includes “Aching Knees in Palm Springs,” “Contemporary American Hunger,” “Learning Economics at Gemco,” “Las Cucarachas,” “The City of Date Fruits and Bullet Wounds,” “The Story My Grandfather Told His Mother a Few Days Before His Death,”I Go Dreaming, Raking Leaves,” and “Network of Bone.”

 

 

Homage to Vallejo

Greenhouse Review Press, 2006
Edited by Christopher Buckley.

This anthology pays homage to Cesar Vallejo’s poem “Black Stone Upon a White Stone.” It includes my poem, “Black Hair Upon a White Pillow,” plus a short prose piece to accompany it.

 

 

 

How to Be This Man

Swan Scythe Press, 2003
Edited by Sandra McPherson

Includes “Father’s Ways of Getting His Jobs Done” and “Humble Body.”

 

 

So Luminous the Wildflowers: An Anthology of California Poets

Tebot Bach, 2003
Edited by Paul Suntap

Includes “Why I Decided to Stay in School”

 

 

Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California

Heyday Books, 2002
Edited by Rick Heide

Includes “Aching Knees in Palm Springs”