The Latino Generation

August 26, 2013
If Kirby gets away with a kind of uncontainable positivity in these poems, he does so in the same way that he gets away with an ode to his hands that, he seems to brag, “have caressed the bottoms of friends’ wives who, to their credit, turned/ in surprise and, on seeing it was me, smiled indulgently/ and went back to their conversations.” Cheerful and boyish, Kirby’s new collection of poems is titled after a woodworking technique used to create an invisible joint between two disparate pieces of wood. The poems flit seamlessly from a senior discount on a cup of coffee to a “guy out there named Señor Poetry. He’ d be at a table in a plaza somewhere with his wife and daughter,/ Señora and Señorita Poetry.” The poems are long and chatty, prosey at times, written as though Kirby was trying to keep up with some bright inspiration moving at breakneck speed. Kirby’s poem “Breathless,” also the name of a French film and a song by Jerry Lee Lewis, adds a hint of tension to the usual ease of his subject matter, asking: “how do you know when to stop?” “If these poems work,” Kirby writes, “they work best when they move the way the mind does.”

May 5, 2014
García, professor of Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara and co-author of Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice, gathers the oral histories of 13 Latino college graduates. The book introduces, among others, Nayeli Reyes, who "lost Spanish" after insisting on speaking only English in pre-school; Tania Picasso, who discusses the pressures surrounding dating and marriage; and David Guerra, who plunged into theater in college and only learned he had an accent when it was pointed out by professors. Most featured graduates were born in the U.S. in the 1980s and raised in strict religious homes by parents who entered the country "without documents." In his edifying introduction, Garcia describes how "the Latino Generation"âchildren of individuals who arrived after the 1965 immigration law reformâhas struggled against a pervasive "neo-nativism," yet has achieved "educational mobility," and has "been influenced by the...unprecedented growth in Latino political power." Garcia's framework for interpreting Latino immigration will undoubtedly shape scholarly and journalistic discussions of Latino communities, and his collected interviews will be useful in college classrooms. 13 illus.