Most of Juan Felipe Herrera’s many books
evoke at once the hardships that
Mexican-Americans have undergone
and the exhilarating space for self-reinvention
that a New World art offers. The child of
migrant workers and now a professor
at the University of California, Riverside,
Herrera began to publish and perform verse
in the late 1960s and early ’70s, amid
the Chicano cultural ferment of Los Angeles
and San Diego; he has been, and should be,
admired for his portrayals of Chicano life.
Yet he is no mere recorder of social conditions.
Herrera is, instead, a sometimes hermetic,
wildly inventive, always unpredictable poet,
whose work commands attention for its style alone.

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