Review by New York Times Review
Herrera's latest collection is a book full of outrages - bigotry, poverty, murder - but not a book that wants to burn things to the ground. The fire that appears again and again in Herrera's poetry exists to illuminate, to make beautiful, to purify. There are "flame etchings," a "fire-embroidered mist" and a peace that "flickers at the end of the flame." A fellow poet burns with "art fire," another is a "word-caster of live coals." Even the memory of Michael Brown, a tree that "stands behind you green with its last two limbs up," will "blossom torches." It's a book-length cry against dehumanization that sounds, somehow, hopeful. Herrera is the new poet laureate of the United States, and he brings a striking C.V. to the job: He's the son of Mexican farm workers, a longtime political activist and a spoken-word artist (and by all accounts a dazzling one). Some of these poems were probably written with a microphone in mind, although the book is as diverse as the world it celebrates and worries over, with concrete poems, dramatic dialogues, ecphrastic poems and elegies, and poems in corresponding Spanish and English versions. There's an urgent, get-the-wordout quality to his unpunctuated lines that sometimes comes at the expense of precision. But Herrera knows how to slow the reader down with subtlety - "9 killed in Charleston, South Carolina/they are not 9 they/are each one" - and the poems have power and energy to burn. ERIC McHENRY'S latest book of poems, "Odd Evening," will be published next year. He teaches at Washburn University and is the poet laureate of Kansas.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 27, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
U.S. Poet Laureate Herrera (Half the World in Light) combines erasure, translation, and elegy in a collection that shows him to be a master of connection. He reveals the fraught places where lives thread together and the seams where they split, his speakers desiring a world of tenderness yet demanding that the reader face violence and tyranny. There is little punctuation and he includes multiple poems in Spanish with English translations, mirroring America's linguistic divide. The long poem "Borderbus" has dialogue in both languages, opening with the heartbreaking, almost whispered, "A dónde vamos where are we going/ Speak in English or the guard is going to come." The English, in a smaller font, reflects the disorientation and desperation of the interplay between the languages and speakers. Herrera manipulates visuals as much as language, utilizing erasure and the illusion of erasure. "You Throw a Stone" manages to simultaneously sound like a children's rhyme, a biblical passage, and a censored Pentagon document. A book of witness and demand, the collection also contains a series of elegies and a smattering of ekphrasis-all riveting, tender, personal, and political. Herrera's sections are brief and the subject matter broad, but everything clicks together through the voice of the quietest man in the room-the one who has probably seen the most. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
As he assumes his post as the 21st U.S. Poet Laureate-the first to be Latino-Herrera is releasing a visually acute, punch-in-the-gut collection that shows off both his craft and his heart. Wound even more tightly than his previous collections, including Half the World in Light, his 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award winner, it begins somewhat abstractly with clouds-"how they fray/. where there is fire and/ thunder-face behind the torn universe"-then moves to the sometimes horribly, terribly concrete. The students of Ayotzinapa, Mexico ("they fired their guns they burned us they dismembered us in trash bags they threw us into the river yet we continue"), police violence ("And if the man with the choke-hold pulls the standing man down why does he live"), ISIS beheadings ("i write in danger/ for lives in danger i-i/ am Kenji Goto"), the murder of African Americans ("5 minute jury/ April 15, 1916 Waco, Texas shackled & dragged-lynched/ you live on// Trayvon Martin face down"), and the burdens of Mexican heritage ("all this has to do with/ The half, the half-thing when you are a half-being")-all are given an urgency that makes readers feel their real weight. Yet if Herrera starkly addresses issues of social justice, you can toss out the worn phrase topical poet. Throughout, he works bigger, touching on life's grace, turbulence, and sheer physicality ("it was my breath upon you/ . revealed by the moon and the moon the wild sickle swan and/ i ascended/ through the fire"), even as he crosscuts his fierce social consciousness with a surreal grasp of a sort of cosmic beauty ("embrace me on the table of the prayer-woman and the anthill dish/ let us go to Carrara to sing to the Count of Sulfurs and ciphers and reefs"). A series of elegies are both affecting and punch-drunk with imagery ("paint me the flying coat color of flame & tutti-frutti/ paint me the face color lion," says the ode to José Montoya). As always, Herrera's signature language is immediate, visceral, in the moment, sometimes razzy-jazzy, and compacted to create intensive feeling. "Jestered ochre yellow my umber Rothko/ divisions my Brooklyns with Jerry Stern/ black then oranged gold leaf & tiny skulls" opens one poem in the section "i do not know what a painting does," proving that he does know what poetry can do. Some readers will find this section rather dense, but as they work to provide connections, they'll get a great appreciation of how poems are created. VERDICT Urgently written and important to read, even if Herrera weren't in the Library of Congress limelight. [See Prepub Alert, 6/14/15.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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