Always Danger

by David Hernandez

Always Danger offers a lyrical and highly imaginative exploration into the hazards that surround people’s lives—whether it’s violence, war, mental illness, car accidents, or the fury of Mother Nature. In his second collection of poems, David Hernandez embraces the element of a soldier takes refuge inside a hollowed-out horse, a man bullies a mountain, and a giant pink donut sponsors age-old questions about beliefs. Hernandez typically eschews the politics that often surround the inner circle of contemporary literature, but in this volume he quietly sings a few bars with a political one poem shadows the conflict in Iraq, another reflects our own nation’s economic and cultural divide. Always Danger parallels Hernandez’s joy of unmapped, spontaneous, and imbued with nuanced revelation.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2006

About the author

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Reviews

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Serendipity is such a wonderful thing when it works well.

In this case, I randomly pulled this volume from a university library shelf after being intrigued by the first poem. It turns out that David Hernandez, a creative writing teacher at California State, is absolutely masterful in his ability to paint the darker side of human nature with vivid language.

And despite his focus on such issues as violence in the world, toxic masculinity, the precariousness of relationships and other somewhat depressing topics, you don't come away from this volume with a sense of despair or hopelessness, because his writing also pulls forth the hopeful silver lining that exists in so many people and situations, or gives us a deeper understanding of our shared shortcomings.

One of my favorites is Aim, a poem about a man who has lost a job and a wife and suffered other indignities, and spends much of his time throwing darts in the garage until his accuracy is almost preternatural.

"So early he awoke in the morning for this,
so late he stayed up working the oiled hinge
of his elbow until summer hoarded its heat
and dragged it elsewhere, until his aim

was a thing to marvel: dead-on, flawless,
nothing he could repeat in his life."

The title poem, too, is a masterpiece of modern dread, how I often feel after watching the news.

Always Danger
Daniel Hernandez

There's always the pit bull
lunging for someone's throat.
There's always the girl
sucked into the shadow of a van
and dumped in a field or the vast
blue of the ocean. And the car
crumpled like foil on the freeway,
the yellow sheet, the vigil
of flares. There's always that.
There's always the plunging of bombs,
those wingless birds, silver-beaked,
whistling their death songs.
There's always the bullied kid,
revenge in his backpack.
Always. And there's always
the Christmas tree in flames,
its ornaments softening
like sherbet, in a house with bodies
dreaming under bedcovers.
A cop to chalk circles around
bullet casings. The black widow
and a baby's pudgy arm. The fallen dominoes
of a derailed train.
There's always an epidemic
congealing in the air. There's
always the busy cafe and someone
in a trenchcoat with his finger
on the switch. There's always
the man with a 3-inch nail
driven through his skull plate
who says he didn't feel a thing.

[Tricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

from gondoliers to spiders lurking on baby's breadstick arms, this book is fabulous. i completely appreciate his mastery of couplets. he takes the notion of twinned lines and forces them into paradoxical roles. each couplet sets itself up and than turns on itself, think snakes swallowing tales. likewise, he transforms the meaning of the poem from one couplet to the next. on the page the poem is laid out like bars or stripes of ink, but with badass steep linebreaks and leaky stanzas, the poems ends up spiraling both lyrically and contextually. couplets not just for lovers, which is awesome.