Ismael García Santillanes lives in the small agricultural town of Mecca in California s Coachella Valley. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and the anthology, New Poets of the American West. This is his first book.
"Ismael Dante fangs and razors in this collection. He cuts through the pallid familiar into the smoldering, moth spotted heaven-hells of memoria, Eros, father-son, mother-child sufferings and the strange muppet-like prison human shadow-lives. No flinching, just says it like he sees it; in princely high-tuned oratory and down-home cholo-style spit. The poems in the voice of a doubaché, bathed in desert vein, crop-pickin Coachella boy, feverish, hungry, muzzled lover, charting the body s failure, burning karma, he says, for the lives I took. Yet, he rises, in this robe of bruised songs paying homage to the double world, inferno-chained and paradiso-free. A new, very brave voice. --Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of California
Poet Ismael García Santillanes a self-named American pocho , meaning poached ; or only half cooked gives us a deeply personal verse biography through captivating and intertwined poems. It is the story of a boy who picks cotton and writes I hate this work: this unforgiving damnation/ It reminds me how poor we are/ and how poor people/ have to sell their muscle at minimum wage ... Yet these are not only stanzas of redemption. These are unique and revealing poems, where the images of the past merge seamlessly into the never-ending life of an imprisoned present. --Emma Sepúlveda, poet and writer
Most people who call themselves poets think they have something to say: they write diary entries and call them poems. Real poets have something to make. Ismael Santillanes has had a remarkable life and has much to say, but he is preeminently a maker of poetry. At his best he makes words stand up for themselves. He is an artist." --William Wilborn, author of All She Wrote
