Description:
Even as he paints a vivid picture of American diversity, Rodriguez exposes the deterioration of our nation--broken promises, failed prosperity, the shattering of dreams. Intimate and urgent, these timely dispatches from the Texas-Mexico border reveal the tensions and contradictions of today's America.
Brief description: José Antonio Rodríguez, Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, is the author of House Built on Ashes: A Memoir, The Shallow End of Sleep, and Backlit Hour.
Review Quotes: "This gorgeous book is full of lyric studies of family, fallible bodies, mutable love, failures of justice. Urgent and necessary, José Antonio Rodríguez's poems interrogate the role of imagination in survival. . . . If you've ever bitten a prayer (or wanted to), these poems are for you."--Traci Brimhall, author of Our Lady of the Ruins