Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Bad Mexican, Bad American: Poems

Bad Mexican, Bad American: Poems

Hernandez Diaz, Jose

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $17.00

ISBN10: 1946724734
ISBN13: 9781946724731
Publisher: Acre Books
Published: Mar 5 2024
Pages: 82
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.24 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.82
Language: English
This collection of poems by Jose Hernandez Diaz showcases the unique style that has made him a rising star in the poetry community.

In Bad Mexican, Bad American, the minimalist, working-class aesthetic of a disadvantaged Brown kid takes wing in prose poems that recall and celebrate that form's ties to Surrealism. With influences like Alberto Ríos and Ray Gonzalez on one hand, and James Tate and Charles Baudelaire on the other, the collection spectacularly combines high art and folk art in a way that collapses those distinctions, as in the poem My Date with Frida Kahlo Frida and I had Cuban coffee and then vegetarian tacos. We sipped on mescal and black tea. At the end of the night, following an awkward silence during a conversation on Cubism, we kissed for about thirty minutes beneath a protest mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Bad Mexican, Bad American demonstrates how having roots in more than one culture can be both unsettling and rich: van Gogh and Beethoven share the page with tattoos, graffiti, and rancheras; Quetzalcoatl shows up at Panda Express; a Mexican American child who has never had a Mexican American teacher may become that teacher; a parent's broken English is beautiful and masterful. Blending reality with dream and humility with hope, Hernandez Diaz contributes a singing strand to the complex cultural weave that is twenty-first-century poetry.

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