Leonard Adame is a poet of memory, family, and culture. His largely autobiographical poetry is full of the stories, characters, and lives of a precisely imagined and reified past. But if Adame is a poet of historical consciousness, he uses history for his own purposes in order not to be used by it.

Adame was born in Fresno, California, a city he remembers, as he puts it in an interview in Piecework: Nineteen Fresno Poets, 1987), in the images of "my grandmother's house, the park, my father's restaurant, a school across the street, and a drug store where I discovered comic books, the Police Gazette, Playboy , Steinbeck, Hemingway." High school was a particularly painful time for Adame, when he was forced to acknowledge his ethnic identity. At graduation a counselor told him he had no business going to college and taking the place of someone who truly deserved to...