Stray Poems opens with San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguía's
inaugural address, where he provides a brilliant and impassioned poetic
account of San Francisco's Native and Latino literary history. What
follows is a selection of Murguía's most recent work, composed over the
past twelve years. These are poems of the twenty-first century, written
in a combination of English and Spanish--the patois of contemporary
America. Angry, rebellious, subversive, sentimental, hip, urban, local,
global.
Alejandro Murguía is the author of Southern Front and This War
Called Love, both winners of the American Book Award. He is San
Francisco's first Latino Poet Laureate.
Praise for Alejandro Murguía & Stray Poems:
In the city of poets, Murguía has become the activist voice of refugees
and exiles--as so many of us are, even as natives--at the center of the
Americas. Disguised by its sensuous intimacy, soothing and ennobling,
his is a poetry that arms the resistance.--Dagoberto Gilb, author of
The Magic of Blood
Poet, teacher, publisher, lover, literary guerrilla--Alejandro Murguía
is a San Francisco treasure. And I'm not saying this because he knows
where to find the best pozole. Although he does.--Jack Boulware,
Litquake co-founder
The powerful stream of rich, diverse Spanish spoken in the United States
by millions of Latinos from Mexico, Central and South America, and the
Caribbean, has rushed into the huge river of the English tongue in such
a way that a language and a literature have been born from those
troubled waters, exploring multiple alternatives and choosing many
paths. These Stray Poems from Alejandro Murguía speak with all those
voices, crossing linguistic borders and really going out of the way to
deviate from the standard path and let the multiracial and
multicultural, all-embracing Latino beat flow into the heart of
English.--Daisy Zamora, The Violent Foam
Murguía with a tango unleashed, a city on fire, a rendezvous of homage,
manifesto, revenge and transcendence--he is alone, without a face, yet
recognizable in every body that swims through the under-streets of the
City, of Paris, of Havana, of bombed-out-Here's-and-There's and the
stripped down body of all of us. No stones are left unturned; hypnotic,
alarming, 'melodramático, ' rough-lovin', unkempt, 'dangerous, ' and
ready to battle at the center of the scorched core. 'I didn't cheat, '
one poem admits. He is on trial--fire-spitter and disassembler of
cultural falsifications, in 'strange' and romantic moods, the poems
scatter truth and aim and blow and burn and rise unto the flagless
sky--'. . . a country of oceans and mountains.' Murguía gets there.
Alone, because few embark on that voyage. An astonishing, brutal
nakedness. Love, that is. No book like it. An unimaginable heart of and
for the peoplea ground--breaking prize.--Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet
Laureate of California
