Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology (LOA #382)

For nearly five centuries, the rich tapestry of Latino poetry has been woven from a wealth of languages and cultures--a "tremendous continental mixturao," in the words of the poet Tato Laviera.

Now, in an unprecedented anthology edited by the poet and critic Rigoberto González, the Library of America brings together more than 180 poets--among them José Martí, Julia de Burgos, Sandra Cisneros, Pedro Pietri, Juan Filipe Herrera, Jaime Manrique, Javier Zamora, Aracelis Girmay, Natalie Diaz, and Ada Limón--whose poems bear witness to the beauty and power of the Latino poetic tradition: its distinctive prosody fusing Anglophone, Hispanic, and Indigenous resonances, its articulation of family and community and enduring connections to inherited wellsprings of speech and music, its exploration of spirituality through praise and lament, and its commitment to vernacular expression as well as experiment and innovation.

As represented here the Latino tradition also displays inspiring forms of political and social engagement, confronting questions--of exile and belonging, language and identity, struggle and solidarity, and labor and landscape--of ever greater urgency and imagining a nation strengthened by the stories of immigrants, exiles, refugees, and their descendants. What emerges via these multivalent poems is nothing less than a vision of what America has been and what it might be.