ABOUT THIS BOOK

Award-winning Latino author Luis J. Rodríguez stuns with My Nature is Hunger. The collection features 26 new poems that reflect Rodríguez’s increasingly global view, his hard-won spirituality, and his movement toward reconciliation with his family and his past, as well as selections from his previous books, Poems Across the Pavement, The Concrete River, and Trochemoche.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Luis J. Rodriguez has published over a dozen books of poetry, children's literature, fiction, and nonfiction. He is best known for his 1993 memoir of gang life, Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. His awards include a Finalist for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award, a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Writers Award, a PEN Josephine Miles Literary Award, a Paterson Poetry Prize, a Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and fellowships from the Sundance Institute, the Lannan Foundation, the City of Los Angeles, the City of Chicago, the California Arts Council, and the Illinois Arts Council, among others. In 2014, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti chose Rodriguez as Poet Laureate of the city. Luis is also a Visiting Scholar at California State University, Northridge.

REVIEWS

"This poetry is of the barrio yet stubbornly refuses to be confined in it—Rodríguez's perceptive gaze and storyteller's gift transport his world across neighborhood boundaries." —Publishers Weekly on Trochemoche

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"Whether he's writing fiction, essays, children's books, or poetry, Rodriguez, an innovative activist as well as an artist and the son of Mexican immigrants, writes of the anguish and anger, determination and revelation experienced by individuals driven from one world and not welcomed in another, and those who are maligned and marginalized for their ethnicity even in the country of their birth."—Booklist

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"[Rodriguez's] voice bares its soul to the reader and pulls us into the haunting images of life's struggle."—Multicultural Review

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

from Poems Across the Pavement — 1989
Running to America
Somebody Was Breaking Windows
Rosalie has Candles
The Monster
Palmas
Piece by Piece
The Calling

from The Concrete River — 1991
Watts Bleeds
Tía Chucha
Night Dance—Watts 1975-78
The Concrete River
The Rooster Who Thought It Was a Dog
Black Mexican
The Bull's Eye Inn
Waiting
Don't Read That Poem!
Jarocho Blues
Jesus Saves
The Blast Furnace
They Come To Dance
Carrying My Tools
Bethlehem No More
Every Road
Every Breath, a Prayer
Lips

from Trochemoche — 1998
Meeting the Animal in Washington Square Park
Victory, Victoria, My Beautiful Whisper
Catacombs
to the police officer who refused to sit in the same room as my son because he's a "gang banger"
A Tale of Los Lobos
Woman of the First Street Bridge
The Rabbi and the Cholo
Cinco de Mayo
Civilization
Fire
Red Screams
A Fence of Lights
Next Generation
At Quenchers Bar When You Said Goodbye
The Face on the Radio
The Object of Intent Is To Get There
Untouched
A Father's Lesson
Francisca
Suburbia
Believe me when I say . . .
Reflection on El Train Glass
The Quiet Woman
Questions for Which You Are Always the Answer
"Eva sitting on the curb with pen and paper before the torturers came to get her"
¡Seguro Que Hell Yes!
Poem for Shakespeare & Company
¡Yo Voy Ami!
Rant, Rave & Ricochet
Cloth of Muscle and Hair
The Old Woman of Mérida
from Notes of a Bald Cricket

New Poems
My Name's Not Rodríguez
Coal-Seller in White Dress
The Cockroaches I Married
Mickey Mouse Pancakes
My Nature Is Hunger
Exiled in the Country of Reason
Passersby
Listening to Return To Forever's "Romantic Warrior" with Susana in an Empty Room of my Recently Rented Echo Park Apartment
Mother by the Lake
Suicide Sweet
Sometimes a Man Comes
Time and Nature
Loving What You Leave
Ritchie Valens Doesn't Sing Here Anymore
Mexika Science
The Gold Beneath Our Feet
Banned
Fat
The Chuskas— Navajo Land 1998
Rez Dogs
Untitled
¡Si, Se Puede! Yes, We Can!
Chuparosa (Hummingbird)
Nightfall: Poems to Ponder in War and Uncertainty
The Wanton Life

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