SOURCE: A review of Where Sparrows Work So Hard by Gary Soto, in ABR, Vol. 4, No. 5, July-August, 1982, p. 11.

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, labyrinthine, infernal world of the human soul, where everything gives evidence of a cosmic devastation. It is not by chance that in the external world which is at once the setting of the poems and the symbolic analogue of that hell, one finds over and over again the images of ruination and perdition: the gray dusks and dark nights that succeed upon one another; the alleys and empty lots and junkyards filled with debris; the telltale dust and ash; the fallen leaves and rolling tumbleweeds; the discarded newspapers undone by the omnipresent wind, which sweeps their pages...