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.

In the following essay, Olivares provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of Soto's poetry.

In the following essay, Soto reminisces about childhood events later utilized in his verse.

In the following essay, de la Fuentes examines Soto's focus on entropy and deterioration in his poetry.

In the following essay, de la Fuentes explores Soto's use of ambiguity as a poetic device.

In the following essay, de la Fuentes discusses Soto's treatment of time and his emphasis on death in Black Hair.

In the following essay, Ganz provides a brief overview of Soto's life and work.

In the following excerpt, Cooley praises the distinctive nature of Soto's verse.

In the following essay, Zamora offers a positive review of Where Sparrows Work So Hard.

[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 which is only recently finished, the 1950's of his childhood. But Soto's first book is no nostalgic venture into "Happy Days." Soto is a Chicano, and probably the most important voice among the young Chicano poets because his poetry comes to us through poems, not propaganda in drag…. (p. 304) A former studen...

[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 Baton Rouge in February 1982.] One of the principal characteristics of Soto's poetry is the apocalyptic vision it reflects of the universe. Recurring images of loss, disintegration, decadence, demolition, solitude, terror and death create a desolate landscape in which the voice of the narrator is that of a passive, impot...

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 fashion. While one line of energy seems bent on reducing the elements to stasis and nothingness—entropy—another tries to structure the elements into combinations of living units. Even the writing of the text is a struggle between the word and a silence that would confirm human isolation and social chaos. Yet there is no reassu...

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 California…. The people are Mexican factory workers, or others whose lives become emblems of the Mexican-American experience. Many of the poems are narrative and reminiscent of Philip Levine's, particularly in the use of colloquial diction and short, enjambed lines. Soto also shares with Levine a surrealistic bent and much subject matt...

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…. This is a profoundly elegiac poetry, in which everything appears condemned to pass away with...

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 imagination. (p. 1) [The poems of Gary Soto's The Tale of Sunlight] are not simply descriptions of the life of the poor Mexican-Americans on both sides of the border. They are far more ambitious than that, which is why I spoke of the poet as the imagination that integrates something new for us, something unknown. Not that poverty is unk...

The biggest failure of many ethnic and minority-group writers is that their political viewpoints often turn them into moralizing zealots or righteous cultural revolutionaries…. Chicano poet Gary Soto, a former fieldhand in the San Joaquin Valley, manages to avoid such shortcomings in The Elements of San Joaquin and thereby establishes that he is considerably more than just a good ethnic writer; he is a good poet. (p. 73) Soto's topics extend beyond the fields and farms into all aspects of migr...

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 of his people. His poems are simple, idiomatic, rhythmic and notable for the strange interplay between images of desperation and transcendence. In a key lyric called "The Shepherd," for example, a pickled three-legged chicken intrudes on the perfectly Apollonian picture of a boy descending from the hills with a harp swung over his sh...