SOURCE: Sullivan, Nancy. “Snap Judgments.” Poetry 116, no. 2 (May 1970): 120-25.

In the following review of Snaps, Sullivan praises Cruz's use of language to depict the atmosphere of life in Spanish Harlem.

Victor Hernandez Cruz is twenty. He was born in Puerto Rico, and has lived in New York City for fifteen years. The poems in Snaps remind me in their subject matter of the taped conversations made by Oscar Lewis for La Vida, his sociological-anthropological study of a group of poor, oppressed Puerto Ricans in New York and San Juan. Cruz has lived in the same miserable New York tenements Lewis explores, ridden the same clacking subways to 114th Street and the Bronx, eaten the same kind of rice and beans, felt-up similar girls, smoked pot and sold it as did the confused young men interviewed for La Vida. But Cruz's language is something else again. While Lewis honed...