Tortured Barrio Songs. By Reyes Cárdenas

$18.00

Tortured Barrio Songs is really not one book, but a Trinity of three books, each tied to and adding to the understanding of the others. Cárdenas brings to bear, once again, his signature no-holds-barred humor, crossed with a stinging criticism of the injustices of being poor in America, something reflected sharply in all three of the works.

Andrés Sobaco, El Numbnuts, a flowing and painfully beautiful novel-in-verse set in the West Side barrios of San Antonio; El Ocho Patas, a darker, more philosophical, and metaphorical tale of the man with eight legs; and Canciones Desesperadas, a collection of poems unveiling the formative root experiences of the poet and other real people in his Vonnegut-style karass of a barrio, together make a book both irreverent and yet somehow filled with respeto for life and the universe.

The tender sacrileges with which he addresses God, or Christ, or La Llorona, remind us of a man whose tragedies have been so crushing that the hope within him has become even more persistent, and even more resilient.

Tortured Barrio Songs is really not one book, but a Trinity of three books, each tied to and adding to the understanding of the others. Cárdenas brings to bear, once again, his signature no-holds-barred humor, crossed with a stinging criticism of the injustices of being poor in America, something reflected sharply in all three of the works.

Andrés Sobaco, El Numbnuts, a flowing and painfully beautiful novel-in-verse set in the West Side barrios of San Antonio; El Ocho Patas, a darker, more philosophical, and metaphorical tale of the man with eight legs; and Canciones Desesperadas, a collection of poems unveiling the formative root experiences of the poet and other real people in his Vonnegut-style karass of a barrio, together make a book both irreverent and yet somehow filled with respeto for life and the universe.

The tender sacrileges with which he addresses God, or Christ, or La Llorona, remind us of a man whose tragedies have been so crushing that the hope within him has become even more persistent, and even more resilient.

Reyes Cárdenas was born and raised in central Texas. He is the author of Anti-Bicicleta Haiku (1976), Survivors of the Chicano Titanic (1981), Elegies For John Lennon (1984, 2006), I Was Never A Militant Chicano (1986), and Chicano Poet: 1970–2010 (2013). In his work, he takes inspiration from pop culture, politics, and Chicano identity. Cárdenas is a machinist by trade, and his work is just now emerging as an important body of writing in Chicano poetry.