World Literature Today, January 1st, 2002
Tucson. University of Arizona Press 2001. 94 pages. $14.95 ISBN 0-8165-1985-4
ALTHOUGH JUAN Felipe Herrera describes himself as a Chicano poet, the bilingual poems in Giraffe on Fire have less to do with cultural identity than with issues of self and survival in a world marked by rapid flux. The voices of the poems are alternately defiant, vengeful, contemplative, and seductive. The polyphonies that emerge in the densely textured, twenty-eight-part long poem "Giraffe on Fire" evoke the complex and unfinished process of "conquest," which for Herrera is ongoing in the sense that cultural and ...
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