The Books We Love in 2016 - The New Yorker
Best Poetry Collections of 2015 - The Washington Post
Best Books 2015: Poetry - Library Journal
Best Books of 2015 - NPR Books
16 Best Poetry Books of 2015 - BuzzFeed Books
Juan Felipe Herrera, the first Latino Poet Laureate of the United States
and son of Mexican immigrants, grew up in the migrant fields of
California.
Exuberant and socially engaged, reflective and healing, this collection
of new work from the nation's first Latino Poet Laureate is brimming
with the wide-open vision and hard-won wisdom of a poet whose life and
creative arc have spanned chasms of culture in an endless crossing,
dreaming and back again.
[This year] Juan Felipe Herrera's Notes on the Assemblage has been a
ladder of hope ...--Ada Limón, The New Yorker
Juan Felipe Herrera's family has gone from migrant worker to poet
laureate of the United States in one generation. One generation. I am an
adamant objector to the Horatio Alger myth of pulling oneself up by the
bootstraps, but Herrera's story is one of epic American proportions. The
heads carved into my own Mount Rushmás would be Cesar Chavez, Dolores
Huerta, Frida Kahlo, El Chapulín Colorado, Selena, and Juan Felipe
Herrera. Notes from the Assemblage further carves out Herrera's place
in American letters.--David Tomas Martinez
At home with field workers, wage slaves, the homeless, little children,
old folks, artists, traditionalists, the avant-garde, students, scholars
and prisoners, the bilingual Juan Felipe Herrera is the real thing: a
populist treasure. He will fulfill his appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate
with the same high energy, savvy, passion, compassion, commitment and
playfulness that his art and life's have always embodied. Bravo!
Bravo!--Al Young
While reporters can give you the what, when, and where of a war, a poet
with the enormous gifts of Juan Herrera can give you its
soul.--Ishmael Reed
I am proud that Juan Felipe Herrera has been appointed U.S. Poet
Laureate, bringing his truthful, beautiful voice to all of us
universally. As the first Chicano Laureate, he will empower all diverse
cultures.--Janice Mirikitani
Herrera is ... a sometimes hermetic, wildly inventive, always
unpredictable poet, whose work commands attention for its style alone
... Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part
oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded
in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly
individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is
one of the first to succeed.--The New York Times
Herrera has the unusual capacity to write convincing political poems
that are as personally felt as poems can be.--National Public Radio
