This creative combination of poetry, fiction and non-fiction focusing on grocery storesin a mix of English and Spanishcreates an epic story of immigration.

U.S. Latinx Literature in Spanish remains an understudied field despite its large and vibrant corpus. This is partly due to the erroneous impression that this literature is only written in English, and partly due to traditional educational programs focusing on English texts to include non-Spanish speakers and non-Latinx students. This has created a vacuum in research about Latinx literary production in Spanish, leaving the contemporary field wide open for exploration. This volume fills this space by bringing contemporary U.S. Latinx literature in Spanish to the forefront of the field. The essays focus on literary production post-1960 and examine texts by authors from different backgrounds writing from the U.S., providing readers with an opportunity to explore new texts in Spanish within U.S. Latinx literature, and a departure point for starting a meaningful critical discourse about what it means to write and publish in Spanish in the U.S. Through exploring literary production in a language that is both emotionally and politically charged for authors, the academia, and the U.S., this book challenges and enhances our understanding of the term ‘Americas’.

"In his poem, "Toward a Portrait of the Undocumented," Javier O. Huerta writes, "The economy is a puppeteer / manipulating my feet. / (Who's in control when you dance?) / Pregnant with illegals, the Camaro / labors up the road; soon I will be born." Sharing similar experiences with the more than eleven million undocumented people who live in the United States, Huerta struggles with his own sense of loss, caught between his life here and his past in Mexico. "Soy nadiense," he writes in another poem - I am from nowhere." "In this, Huerta's first full-length collection of poetry, he explores themes of dislocation, loss, love, and art. Whether mourning the tragic suffocating deaths of immigrants in a tractor trailer, lamenting the loss of a lover, or writing about childhood fears, Huerta sketches haunting pieces about a bilingual, bicultural experience. In "Coyote" Huerta evokes a child's unvoiced fear about his father, who his cousins tell him is a coyote, an immigrant smuggler. "I was only six so I pictured Father on all fours with tongue out, panting, on the prowl."" --Book Jacket.

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

A collection of poems by a San Francisco doctor of Latino origin. The subjects include: an immigrant's son discovers his cultural identity, a physician awakens to the suffering of his patients, and two gay Latinos fall in love.

The University of Nevada Press is pleased to publish its first dual-language (Spanish-English) book of poetry, To the North/Al norte: Poems, by the Nicaraguan poet León Salvatierra. The work is rooted in the Central American diaspora that emerged from the civil wars in the 1980s. The poems are tied together through the experiences, memories, visions, and dreams of a 15-yearold boy who embarked on a journey to the United States with a group of forty other migrants from Central America. After being undocumented for eleven years, Salvatierra established himself in the United States, first becoming a naturalized citizen and then obtaining a university education. Salvatierra mixes lyrical and prose poems to explore the experience of exile in a new country. His powerful metaphors and fresh images inhabit spaces fraught with the violence, anxiety, and vulnerability that undocumented Central American migrants commonly face in their transnational journeys. His vivid memories of Nicaragua tie the personal experiences of his poetic subjects to the geopolitical history between the Central American region and the United States.

Chicana/o literature frequently depicts characters who exist in a vulnerable liminal space, living on the border between Mexican and American identities, and sometimes pushed to the edge by authorities who seek to restrict their freedom. As this groundbreaking new study reveals, the books themselves have occupied similarly precarious positions, as Chicana/o literature has struggled for economic viability and visibility on the margins of the American publishing industry, while Chicana/o writers have grappled with editorial practices that compromise their creative autonomy. From the Edge reveals the tangled textual histories behind some of the most cherished works in the Chicana/o literary canon, tracing the negotiations between authors, editors, and publishers that determined how these books appeared in print. Allison Fagan demonstrates how the texts surrounding the authors’ words—from editorial prefaces to Spanish-language glossaries, from cover illustrations to reviewers’ blurbs—have crucially shaped the reception of Chicana/o literature. To gain an even richer perspective on the politics of print, she ultimately explores one more border space, studying the marks and remarks that readers have left in the margins of these books. From the Edge vividly demonstrates that to comprehend fully the roles that ethnicity, language, class, and gender play within Chicana/o literature, we must understand the material conditions that governed the production, publication, and reception of these works. By teaching us how to read the borders of the text, it demonstrates how we might perceive and preserve the faint traces of those on the margins.