Bad Mexican, Bad American : Poems

This collection of poems by Jose Hernandez Diaz showcases the unique style that has made him a rising star in the poetry community. In Bad Mexican, Bad American, the minimalist, working-class aesthetic of a "disadvantaged Brown kid" takes wing in prose poems that recall and celebrate that form's ties to Surrealism. With influences like Alberto R�os and Ray Gonzalez on one hand, and James Tate and Charles Baudelaire on the other, the collection spectacularly combines "high" art and folk art in a way that collapses those distinctions, as in the poem "My Date with Frida Kahlo": "Frida and I had Cuban coffee and then vegetarian tacos. We sipped on mescal and black tea. At the end of the night, following an�awkward silence during a conversation on Cubism, we kissed for about thirty minutes beneath a protest mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros."Bad Mexican, Bad American demonstrates how having roots in more than one culture can be both unsettling and rich: van Gogh and Beethoven share the page with tattoos, graffiti, and rancheras; Quetzalcoatl shows up at Panda Express; a Mexican American child who has never had a Mexican American teacher may become that teacher; a parent's "broken" English is beautiful and masterful. Blending reality with dream and humility with hope, Hernandez Diaz contributes a singing strand to the complex cultural weave that is twenty-first-century poetry.