PIEDRA: New Poems by Luis Alberto Urrea
PIEDRA, a new collection of poems by Luis Alberto Urrea
Luis Alberto Urrea is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and the best-selling author of 18 books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. He's been honored with a 2019 Pushcart Prize, an American Academy of Arts & Letters award and an Edgar Award. His most recent book is The House of Broken Angels, a NYTimes Notable Book of the year, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recently acquired by the Hulu network for a series. His novel Into the Beautiful North is a selection of the NEA Big Reads program. He is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
PIEDRA is a song welling up from the earned wisdom of a life, a cry to the gods, a prayer to the ancestors and to the earth itself. Urrea’s verses praise the living and the dead, knowing full well that “we toil/in the basement/of the angel factory.” Just read “Breve Poema de Amor” and tell me you aren’t in love. Just read PIEDRA and tell me the world you live in hasn’t shifted on its axis.
—Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet
That which cannot be destroyed — so it is, this is Urrea’s Piedra Tao, Urrea’s third eye swiveling across the cosmos & canyons, timeless in “this kernel of corn,” an endless spiraling prayer of the rezanderas, an inky rosario of vision heat, caminatas, a sitting on the “oldest stone on the earth,” as he writes he throws his arms up, cracks open his chest to the night stars and the sacred blaze of the “angel factory” — he chants, he whispers, tender and ragged on the “curve of cerulean blue” the poems, the book. The “Piedra,” “arises “wild and free,” this is ocean magic, restitched sizzling bullets of Zapata, you will eat seashell and taste “Belgian stamps,” you will lean on wild wolves, smell their pelts, you will “feed iguanas,” you will eat at the restaurant of Urrea’s mysteries, unlock their ancient honeyed lips and smear your face upon them and their shadows will come to you and you will enter the life and lives of the blinking elements of Piedra consciousness forever. I absolutely love this book, these poems, these short-line and long-line, night and dawn painted teachings. An incredible pyramid and temple of word magic. Bravissimo! No doubt, no return.
—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, Emeritus