When There Were No Borders - by Raúl Sánchez (Paperback)

About the Book

These versos harken back to the original masters of the movimiento. Raul Sanchez reminds me why I started writing poems so long ago. They burn with witness and life.

Book Synopsis

Raúl Sánchez's long-awaited 2nd book is a gift, a gateway, a harvest. These poems present and re-present our "tongue," our "language," our "culture and pride." Steeped in history and "blood blood blood" unforgotten and dignified, these poems are never what you expect yet are as familiar as an ancestral landscape. Deeply layered like culture itself, this book es una flor, multi-petalled, many-voiced - sin frontera and utterly unique. From rich love poems to Nerudaesque declamaciónes to canciones and cantos, this book represents as we were, and are, When There Were No Borders, by presenting the multiverse that is US of America through the voice of one, Raúl Sánchez, crossing borders.

Review Quotes

Sánchez writes borderless in borderless times. He breaks through the ancient Mexica figure of

death and transformation, Coatlicue, to poems as pyramids, to the Sea of the Salish in the

Pacific Northwest and on to cool-rebel Pachuco dialect of the US-Mexico borderlands. He cooks

on a rotating rainbow-colored pan, he spices, he refuses to present his "papers" at the border

stop. There are nectars, harvests, the always-farmworker fields, a detention center to tend to

with resources and a poet. Open this collection - hold on, there is a "pirinola," an ever

spinning umbrella-shaped candy with a pointed tip burning colors, lights and stories that will

take you to Latinx multi-dimensional magic. A precise, moving mural, this text of visitations of

"life, precious life!" Sanchez's delights as he writes, as he tears across those borderlines,

dancing. Magnificent poetics to take home and to take you out.

Juan Felipe Herrera

Poet Laureate of the United States Emeritus