Gary Soto is at heart a poet; everything he writes is overflowing with the vivid details of everyday life. Soto takes joy in the little things--remembered smells, voices in the distance, the pull of m...
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The son of American-born parents of Mexican background, Gary Soto was born on 12 April 1952 in Fresno, California. His father, also born in Fresno, was killed in an accident at work at the age of twen...
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In the following excerpt, Cooley praises the distinctive nature of Soto's verse.
They keep coming back: the ring of a streetcar on Grand River Avenue, the flies that hummed by a light on the...
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In the following essay, Zamora offers a positive review of Where Sparrows Work So Hard.
In Where Sparrows Work Hard, the poet takes the reader on a journey of exploration through the subterranean, ...
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In the following essay, de la Fuentes explores Soto's use of ambiguity as a poetic device.
Although Aristotle was “inclined to consider all ambiguity as a perversion or failing of lan...
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In the following essay, de la Fuentes examines Soto's focus on entropy and deterioration in his poetry.
In discussing the relationship between entropy and art, Rudolf Arnheim (1971) points o...
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In the following essay, de la Fuentes discusses Soto's treatment of time and his emphasis on death in Black Hair.
In Feeling and Form, a theory of art developed from her Philosophy in a New ...
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In the following essay, Olivares provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of Soto's poetry.
In the poem “Chuy” from Gary Soto's Where Sparrows Work Hard (35), the spea...
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In the following essay, Soto reminisces about childhood events later utilized in his verse.
As a boy growing up in Fresno I knew that disease lurked just beneath the skin, that it was possible to w...
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In the following essay, Manson contends that Soto's poetry should be considered outside of the American poetic tradition, contrasting his work with that of Robert Hass and Robert Frost.
The ...
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In the following essay, Ganz provides a brief overview of Soto's life and work.
In the early 1950s Fresno, California, was an arid and grimy city of 91,000 inhabitants. Many were caught in a...
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Critical Essay by Publishers Weekly
Soto's poems [in "The Tale of Sunlight"] are set in an abstract landscape of sun, wind, sky and river that seems alive to the emotional needs ...
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Critical Essay by Jerry Bradley
The biggest failure of many ethnic and minority-group writers is that their political viewpoints often turn them into moralizing zealots or righteous cultural revoluti...
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Critical Essay by Jascha Kessler
I'm sure that one of the reasons we are always looking for a new poet is our expectation of some novelty, some word from a place we have not been before in our...
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Critical Essay by Peter Cooley
[The Elements of San Joaquin] is a younger man's book; it isn't patronizing to say so. The poems lay down before us a period in the speaker's life ...
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Critical Essay by Vicki Armour-hileman
Following the tradition he established in his two previous books, Gary Soto makes the subject of Where Sparrows Work Hard the Chicano experience and the setting...
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Critical Essay by Carlos Zamora
In Where Sparrows Work Hard, the poet takes the reader on a journey of exploration through the subterranean, labyrinthine, infernal world of the human soul, where ever...
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Critical Essay by Bruce-novoa
In Gary Soto's The Elements of San Joaquin (1977) the world struggles to survive disintegrating forces, from natural, to social, to human, that grind on in cyclic...
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Critical Essay by Patricia De La Fuente
[The essay from which this excerpt is taken was read, in a slightly different version, at the Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures in Ba...
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Gary Soto: A Career in Excellence
by Colin Swanson
Gary Soto is a Mexican - American author and poet. He grew up in a Mexican-American neighborhood in Fresno, California. His heritage is a central f...
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Gary Soto
Gary Soto
Critical Essay by Peter Cooley
Gary Soto: A Career in Excellence
