Juan Felipe Herrera was acclaimed "one of the finest, most innovative, and most challenging contemporary Chicano poets," by Lauro H. Flores in Dictionary of Literary Biography. In books such as Rebozos of Love and Exiles of Desire, the award-winning Herrera gives voice to the Chicano experience, exhorting his people in a mixture of Spanish and English to be proud of their heritage, his language at once direct and sometimes playful. Herrera's more recent poetry collections for adults, while extending beyond the bounds of the Chicano movement, often hark back to the author's personal experience of growing up a Chicano. Blending poetry with narrative prose in his 1997 memoir Mayan Drifter, Herrera records a visit to the Mexico of his roots. Herrera "is a story-teller, a surrealist, and a polemicist all at once," summed up Marvin Bell in Boston Review, "and as a writer he goes beyond the sometimes brittle...