The Great Whirl of Exile

For those who know his history, it is no surprise that Leroy V. Quintana is a great storyteller in his poetry. He was raised in Albuquerque by Mexican grandparents, who told him numerous folktales (Cuentos) as a child. "In many ways, I'm still basically a smalltown New Mexico boy carrying on the oral tradition, " he comments. His work is endowed not only with a raucous frontier humor, but also a remarkable emotional range, from comic depictions of adolescent love to moving poems of death and loss, to reflections on his war experience in Vietnam. Yusef Komunyakaa commented about Quintana's Vietnam poems in Interrogations: "Leroy Quintana's poems, these shards of penetrating clarity, are filled with surprises that force us to question ourselves."