Bøger af Manuel Paul Lopez

Poetry. Fiction. Hybrid Genre. Latinx Studies. THESE DAYS OF CANDY is a collection of mixed- genre work, including verse play, micro fiction, serial and solo poem, ekphrastic, and poem cycle riffing on the YouTube tutorial phenomenon. This collection utilizes tropes that point to fable and fairy tale, while releasing faint notes of surrealism, Dada-caca, Raskal Chicanx Poetiks, big-hearted lyric, fronterismo, collage, and elliptical dream messaging, among other gadgets derived from the deliriously ambulatory interior vita. Thematically, these works explore and respond to state-sanctioned surveillance, hyper- policing of person/hood, neighbor/hood and global/hood, atmospheric violence in its various iterations, loss and love, and the slow asphyxiation of ego addiction. In these pages, readers are introduced to characters, like Lulu, the superstar crossing guard angel, a Muppet-like addict, an eccentric stenographer dictating cosmic courtroom dramas, a band of fireflies responding to metaphysical help-hollers, military operatives renouncing war with love and art, and an immigrant child battling the exteriorly-induced attacks of otherness and distance.

The poems in Manuel Paul Lopez's The Yearning Feed, winner of the 2013 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, are embedded in the San Diego/Imperial Valley regions, communities located along the U.S.-Mexico border. Lopez, an Imperial Valley native, considers La Frontera, or the border, as magical, worthy of Macondo-like comparisons, where contradictions are firmly rooted and ironies play out on a daily basis. These poems synthesize Lopez's knowledge of modern and contemporary literature with a border-child vernacular sensibility to produce a work that illustrates the ongoing geographical and literary historical clash of cultures. With humor and lyrical intensity, Lopez addresses familial relationships, immigration, substance abuse, violence, and, most importantly, the affirmation of life. In the poem titled "e;Psalm,"e; the speaker experiences a deep yearning to relearn his family's Spanish tongue, a language lost somewhere in the twelve-mile stretch between his family's home, his school, and the border. The poem "e;1984"e; borrows the prose-poetics of Joe Brainard, who was known for his collage and assemblage work of the 1960s and 1970s, to describe the poet's bicultural upbringing in the mid-1980s. Many of the poems in The Yearning Feed use a variety of media, techniques, and cultural signifiers to create a hybrid visual language that melds "e;high"e; art with "e;low."e; The poems in The Yearning Feed establish Lopez as a singular and revelatory voice in American poetry, one who challenges popular perceptions of the border region and uses the unique elements of the rich border experience to inform and guide his aesthetics.