The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (review)

Francisco Aragón's anthology The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry represents a new phase in the maturation of Latino poetry and poetics in the US. The title of this superb collection comes from a line in Gloria Anzaldúa's poem "Nopalitos," a respectful gesture to the influence of Borderlands/La Frontera, recognizing that, as Aragón claims in his introduction, "the bedrock of Latino poetry is Chicano poetry, both in proportion and subject matter" (1). Aragón's tact is inestimable, for his ambition is to diverge from long-standing trends in Latino literature. As he pays due homage to what has become the US Latino tradition, a canon in which the ethos and pathos of social justice feature largely in the poetry, he is clear in articulating his purpose with this volume: "[P]oems that address the social and the political continue to be vital strands in Latino poetry today. But if this focus … was the dominant mode in years past, the work of The Wind Shifts suggests that the canvas is now larger, its border expanded to include subject matter that is not overtly political. Rather … it is work that is equally, if not more, informed by an exploration of language and aesthetics" (1).

In his foreword to the collection, Juan Felipe Herrera disagrees in part; he claims that the poems that comprise this collection function less to expand borders—that they "have more to do with the contraction of those supposed borders" (xiii). For different reasons, Aragón and Herrera are both right. The collection contracts borders by, as Herrera puts it, including so many poems nested in private experiences, journeying into "a vortex of micro-histories and herstories" in which the "sensorium of the verse seems paramount" (xiii). But The Wind Shifts also expands borders by representing so many different, layered cultural experiences (immigrant, visitor, and native) of US Latino subjectivity—as well as by encompassing a diverse range of poetic forms.

Aragón, a San Francisco Bay Area native of Nicaraguan descent who lived ten years in Spain, has struck a much-needed delicate balance with this book. Demographically speaking, the twenty-five poets in this collection are of Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Bolivian, Nicaraguan, and Southwestern descent, and yet Aragón's process of selecting this diverse group of poets was not deliberately inclusive but rather grew out of his exposure to much of their work when reading manuscripts submitted for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, a first-book competition. As a collection of new Latino poetry, The Wind Shifts anthologizes emergent, younger poets, yet the range of styles and voices adds up to a mature take on the state of Latino poetry today. Bold, probing selections demonstrate fairness and leadership on Aragón's part—for example, he does not discriminate against (New) Formalism as do so many poetry editors recently trained in MFA programs. Aragón understands his role as an intermediary of tastes and voices, giving others the stage instead of branding the book with his own private aesthetic agenda.

The diversity of forms represented in this book is one of its finest qualities. For example, prose poems range dramatically in style. Richard Blanco's "In Defense of Livorno" strides steadily through cool sentences: "At breakfast, from behind tiny glasses of orange juice and porcelain cups of coffee, everyone's eyes are asking: Where the hell are we?" (49). Scott Inguito's "Bats Trace Their Droppings Painting Words" builds intensity with firm fragments: "Ritual hours lodge themselves in the grotto, beautiful soft shores absence of she" (159). Paul Martínez Pompa's "While Late Capitalism" is a harried string of hyphen-sutured abbreviations evocative in its sullen imagery: "-th-mans-head-which-nods-back-&-frth-with-eachbump-in-th-road-" (242).

The free-verse compositions also range widely in degrees of continuity and surprise. Even comparing poems with like palettes of images, technique and approach change registers and enrich the texture...