I'm sure that one of the reasons we are always looking for a new poet is our expectation of some novelty, some word from a place we have not been before in our imagination. (p. 1)

[The poems of Gary Soto's The Tale of Sunlight] are not simply descriptions of the life of the poor Mexican-Americans on both sides of the border. They are far more ambitious than that, which is why I spoke of the poet as the imagination that integrates something new for us, something unknown. Not that poverty is unknown, but that this people's life in the cities of the Southwest, the fields and the factories in the U.S. and in Mexico, is not something the fantasy and the news of the media can ever offer, from the inside, from the experiences of a lifetime, as it were.

And Soto is a young poet who...