Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today's Latino Renaissance

by Ray Gonzalez (Editor)

As we approach the new century, Latino poetry is in the midst of its most vital and productive period. Poetry by Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans has changed the course of contemporary American writing forever.  And it has done this by emphasizing poetry as the sound of everyday life--showing readers and other writers that the most effective manner of preserving the traditions of a culture comes from the colorful language of daily experience.

Touching the Fire recognizes the excitement of this movement by focusing on a few of its major poets, presenting a substantial portion of each poet's work.  Some of these poets--Martin Espada, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Victor Hernandez Vruz, for example--have been writing and publishing a long time.  Some are only starting their careers.  But they were all chosen because they best represent the strongest elements of modern Latino poetry--a confidence of language in its many forms, a gift for shattering emotional honesty, and an ear for the rhythms of a vibrant culture.

Featuring the poetry of:

Sandra M. Castillo
Lorna Dee Cervantes
Judith Ortiz Cofer
Victor Hernandez Cruz
Silvia Curbelo
Juan Delgado
Martin Espada
Diana Garcia
Richard Garcia
Ray Gonzalez
Maurice Kilwein Guevara
Juan Felipe Herrera
Dionisio D. Martinez
Valerie Martinez
Gloria Vando

Genres: Poetry

316 pages, Paperback

First published January 20, 1998

About the author

The work of award-winning poet and editor Ray Gonzalez is inextricably linked to his Mexican ancestry and his American southwestern upbringing. Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, Gonzalez has employed Chicano imagery in his poetry, oftentimes alluding to America's indigenous past, and particularly to the southwestern desert cultures. Gonzalez has published several collections of his poetry and has served as editor of several anthologies of writings, most of which emphasize the contributions of Chicano authors to the literary scene. These anthologies, including 1998's Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today's Latino Renaissance, provide a medium for many up-and-coming Latino writers to get their work to the public.

Reviews

[Kaion · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with any book that proclaims its contemporary nature, Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today's Latino Renaissance risks dating itself when one realizes that the titular "today" was 1998. That being said, I haven't read a lot of more modern poetry, so all the Latino poets featured were certainly new to me.

In the introduction, Ray Gonzalez explains he chose these poets for their "confidence of language... gift for shattering, emotional honesty, and ear for the rhythms of a vibrant culture", which is particularly generic and not particularly informative. I would've liked to know more about his selection process, particularly whether he searched more for more diverse voices through less mainstream sources, and resources for readers who want to know more about this "Latino Renaissance". In particular, Gonzalez's selections play towards a certain overly careful, studied quality that become less surprising when the one reads the author bios and finds that at least half the poets are professors. This is especially obvious in the political-themed poems, which as a whole lack a certain authentic panache to go with their professorial-informativeness.

One of the standout poems, "Green Corn Season" by Diana Garcia might be one of the most writerly of the selections, but escapes this studied quality by it clear deliniation of character (a mother speaking to a grown daughter) and the sensuality of its descriptions:
[Green Corn Season]

You promised you would never keep
secrets from me. You told me
everything: how rain tinkled
on your bedroom walls; how you thought
you were dying the first time blood
spotted your panties; how your stomach
lurched when the boy you liked
asked you to the prom. All you said
that night was that you danced
in a field of green corn, dirt smell
old beneath you heels, the gibbous
moon lighting your steps as the tape
rang out Rosamaría fue a la playa
and you said you hoped one day
you'd swim at the beach. Now,
you're pregnant, two almost three
months, but you haven't said
a word. A mother notes these things
about her daughter:
the way tipped breasts swell
like egg whites whipped twice
their volume, no more small whorl
of nipple brought to peak; your
unrelenting hunger for ice cream
on ripe melon, how you spoon
small bites as if to guide them
to specific cells. I bear full
responsibility. You were my grand
design, part nature-child and part
small philosopher propped in a blind
of apricot, swooning in the fruits'
perfume, a favorite book crooked
in the "v" of a branch. Often
I watched you set aside your book
to study light playing on slim,
tanned thigh, the play of skin
against leaf and bark, all part
of the same glowing world.
I watched you grow lush, tender,
pulling for the sun. Some truths
a daughter needn't tell her mother,
how we wax gibbous on beds
of disked fields, moonlight glancing
off sloped shoulders, the urge
to begin in the green corn season.

The real find for me was however, was Silvia Curbelo, who in her best poems posseses such a quiet, planted voice that her offered images seem to seem to rise out of memory itself (the "wave" of a blue scarf in "Photograph of My Parents"), and her wisdows sound like half-forgotten promises ("These hands are not a harvest,/There is no honest metaphor for bread." in "Between Language and Desire"). Both of these appear in "Tourist Weather", where the language is so finely tuned to sound and rhythm that there is a seemlessness to its progression:
[Tourist Weather]

All summer long hurricanes
with the names of movie stars
light up the weather map
across four counties. We drive
in silence out of the hospital
and towards the small strips
where souvenir shops with nautical names
are selling everything half-price.

***

Shells are bones. I've put on
your old raincoat. Whatever
plays on the car radio belongs
to the rain. Weather is the
only news worth waiting for.
Last night the young nurse
threw open all the windows moments
before the first storm hit
and through the trees we could hear
the coarse talk of the waves,
a language without tenderness.

***

Driftwood, seashell, stone.
Some things are more
than their names.
Like hurricanes. Or cancer.
A word like that can kill you.

***

A shell held to one's ear
tells nothing. Rain falls
between the cracks of what
we mean to say. Last night
I dreamt cool water filled my mouth
and my own voice, adrift inside it,
held itself up to you
like any human thirst.

Other notables:
Judith Ortiz Cofer- "Las Magdalenas"
Maurice Kilwein Guevara- "The Buddy Holly Poem"
Dionisio D. Martinez- "The Cultivation of Orchids"

As a whole, it does feel like the anthology could've benefitted from diverse voices & more experimental and playful forms (wherist the slams?), and the lack of context for this "Latino Renaissance" and the selection of poems does make this book questionable from a critical standpoint. That being said, Touching the Fire does include enough of a selection that I think any reader would leave with a few finds. Rating: 3 stars

[Marcella · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me and my tastes that screws more towards prose this is a 3 , but if simply compared to books of poems only, it is certainly more a 4.5. Well-done collection of modern voices that are utterly readable and resonant, with the stand out poems being:

Dionisio D. Martinez (almost all of his poems, but esp.)
* A Discreet Prayer
* Kinescope
* Standard Time: Novena for My Father
* Nocturnes

Lorna Dee Cervantes
* The Poet IS Served Her Papers
* The Levee: Letter to No One
* To We WHo Were Saved by the Stars

Richard Garcia
* Nobody Here But Us
* Dangerous Hats
* The Story of Keys

Victor Hernandez Cruz
* New/aguas Buenas/Jersey
* The Art of Hurricanes

Silvia Curbelo
* Dreaming Horse
* Bedtime Stories
* Tonight I Can Almost Hear the Singing

Juan Delgado
* When You Leave

Diana Garcia
* Turns at a Dance

Maurice Kilwein Guevara
* The Long Woman Bathing

Juan Felipe Herrera
* Ataavistic: Traces after the Rain

[Danine · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is something about Latin culture that captures life, death and everything in between so powerfully with its words.

The poems in this book made me jealous that I didn't write the words myself. I hade to put the book down and breath because I was overtaken by the use and arangement of words these poets have concieved.