SOURCE: “The Surreal and the Real,” in American Book Review, Vol. 18, No. 5, July/August, 1997, pp. 23-24.

In the following essay, Hatch regrets that Quintana's poetry seldom delves beneath the surface of his characters' attitudes and responses.

If a reader comes to these two books of poetry hoping to be informed about the contemporary Chicano experience, he or she will be left asking, “Which particular one?” Juan Felipe Herrera's Love after the Riots is in essence and in detail an urban poem, self-conscious and nervy, while Leroy V. Quintana's simple poems in My Hair Turning Gray among Strangers (introduction by Robert Creeley) concentrate their attention on ordinary people who live, if not in the country, then at least in a backwater. Two more different approaches to writing could not be found. Herrera's style strives for the liberation of surrealism, an idealistic form of writing that was implicitly political from...