Notes from the Last Age

Notes from the Last Age by José Chapa Valle is a collection of poems with speculative elements and precise language. It searches for the extraordinary in everyday life, for the familiar in the unknown, and makes possible these discoveries with a poetic voice that values omission as much as lyric beauty. Whether the age in the title refers to a distant future excavated by a new tribe of creators, or to our own, long forgotten time, this volume is sure to incite wonder.

Chapa’s crafted voices and text “drift” through “celestial” spheres as they pierce into day-to-day realms. We enter a melodic story  of dream layers and oracular futures in the present. As you open each line you tumble through Chapa’s blurred worlds, this spell-binding collection -  trembling spirit and earth lands, quantifiable and unknowable.” Bravo! A new brave voice of multiple possible impossibilities rises.

—Juan Felipe Herrera

Poet Laureate of the United States, Emeritus

Jose Chapa writes with a candor and velocity of some sophisticated monk sent back from the future with dust in his throat and truth in his eyes. Mild, dizzying, delightful, Notes from the Last Age, arrives from the palm of one of our brightest poets. Crafted at the edge of two civilizations, thrumming with wonders, and revelatory in its honesty, Chapa has written our generation's  Martín & Meditations on the South Valley. If you don't love it, you suck. 

—Brian Allen Carr, author of Opioid, Indiana

Raw is the first word, but not the last. José Chapa Valle's Notes from the Last Age is beautiful and brutal, strange and familiar, dark and brilliant. Valle's words are ice beasts on fire running from some faraway galaxy to your pocket, from unknown futures to a past in Veracruz. These poems create two hands; one beneath you, cradling you in its warmth, the other looming above you, pregnant with violence. You will love both equally.

—Gabino Iglesias, author of Coyote Songs