Renegade artist, surrealist, collagist, poet, and activist, Ronnie Burk is a Tejano-Chicano-Mexicano who voices what he feels is the crisis in civilization at the end of the twentieth century. Burk believes that the role of the artist is to find the trapdoor out of this oppressive society; his contribution to Chicano literature is his synthesis of surrealism, Tibetan Buddhism, indigenous (particularly Mexican) iconography and indigenous American landscapes, Mexican politics, gayness, and a critique of "world orders." His poetry and his collages chronicle a process of intuiting, seeking and then discovering validation for an intuition each time more informed by the experience of the search.

In the 1970s, Burk's initial impulse was toward a surrealist vision, even though at the time he had no orientation toward surrealism philosophically. His predisposition toward exploring and unearthing often unlikely correspondences reflects a certain mindfulness and a play of consciousness that come about...