what I'm on
80 pages, 6 x 8
Paperback
Release Date:05 Mar 2009
ISBN:9780816527403
CA$20.95 Back Order
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what I'm on

SERIES:
The University of Arizona Press
Luis Valadez is a performance poet and his poems shout to be read aloud. It’s then that their language dazzles most brightly. It’s then that the emotions bottled up on the page explode beyond words. And there is plenty of emotion in these poems. Frankly autobiographical, they recount the experiences of a Mexican American boy growing up in a tough town near Chicago. Just as in life, the feelings in these poems are often jumbled, sometimes spilling out in a tumble, sometimes coolly recollected. Sometimes the words jump and twitch as if they’d been threatened or attacked. Sometimes they just sit there knowingly on the page, weighted down by the stark reality of it all.

José García
put a thirty-five to me
my mother was in the other room
He would have done us both
if not for the lust of my fear


This new Mexican American/Chicano voice is all at once arresting, bracing, shocking, and refreshing. This is not the poetry you learned in school. It owes as much to hip hop as it does to the canon. But Valadez has paid his academic dues, and he certainly knows how to craft a poem. It’s just that he does it his way.

i anagram and look and subject to deformation and reconfiguring . . .
it ain’t events or blocks that ahm jettisoning through this process
it be layers of meaning, identity, narrative, and ego that gets peeled off
i can only increase my own understanding
Luis H. Valadez received his B.A. from Columbia College Chicago and his M.F.A. from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He is the winner of the Lily Endowment and a Hispanic Scholarship Fund Scholar. His work has appeared in esteemed journals such as Columbia Poetry Review, Bombay Gin, and Wet: A Journal of Proper Bathing. 
dear reader: this is what i thought on easter day
Getten Rid of Histree
chiquito
Taurus in the Sixth Cusp
Raymond
Kil-lahhh!
Section 5
Mars Sesquiquadrate Jupiter
Talkin’ Shit to Dharma
Walking Home from the Bus
From Behind the PACE Bus Station
no cops/no parents/no memory
versus
Capricorn on the Second Cusp
Neptune in the First House
Jesus Sestina
eatin’ wit’ Christ
eatin’ wit’ Christ
wit’ Christ
Christ as Bastard
Section 18
Section 13
potato peeling
frontin’
Section 7
Mercury in the Second House
Gemini in the Seventh Cusp
radio
esau past love
you goddamn bastard
want to touch my sister
the won category
Dharma Talkin’ Shit
Moon Semisquare Uranus
Moon Conjunction Moon
Saturn in the Ninth House
Taurus in the Sixth Cusp
Moon Square Venus
Sun Semisquared Uranus
Stabbed in the Neck
Yo Dharma
if there’s a me to fuk wit’
Acknowledgments
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