A spare and considered surrealism resonates throughout the poems of Ernesto Trejo. From his early work to his recent, whether in Spanish or in English, Trejo celebrates the imagination and its power to breathe a sense of expanded consciousness into the objects and events of the world. He employs inventive language and imagery, yet he is never overtaken by abstraction or the temptations of style for its own sake. His landscapes and scenarios are centered in the simple yet often unexpected situations of daily life. Trejo manages to keep a clear narrative path moving through most of his work while at the same time his phrasing emphasizes compression. This technique makes the emotions and ideas of his poems accessible to the reader even though Trejo is working at the edge of the surreal image-making process. With an understated magic resulting from both a powerful imagery and a great...