The Author / Poet / Speaker

The author, Juan Felipe Herrera, is of Mexican ancestry, and has written, published, taught, and performed primarily in America. All this, combined with his history of using his art as a form of activism and the frequent use of first person language in the poems, suggests that a great many of the poems are based on personal experience. As a Spanish-speaking member of the Latinx community, living and working in a socio-cultural-political-economic environment (the United States) that provably exploits and oppresses members of that community, Herrera has seen, heard, and felt the racism-defined experiences highlighted and portrayed in many of the collection’s poems. The calls for revolution in those poems are Herrera’s, even though they sometimes emerge in the mouths of other characters or in poetic language of metaphor and image. This, in turn, suggests that the images and experiences of peace, hope...