From one of the prominent Chicano poets writing today comes a collection of poems to take your breath away. With dazzling speed and energy, Juan Felipe Herrera sends readers rocketing through verbal space in a celebration of the rhythms and textures of words that will make you want to shout, dance, and read out loud. Like a wild ride in a fast car, Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream moves at breakneck speed, a post-Lorca journey across the new millennium terrain. Words careen through space and time, through blighted urban landscapes, past banjos and bees, past AIDS faces and mad friars, past severed heads and steel-toed border-crosser boots.

To the rhythm of “The Blue Eyed Mambo that Unveils My Lover’s Belly”and the sounds of the Last Mayan Acid rock band, Herrera races through the hallucinations of a nation that remains just outside of paradise. With dazzling poems that roar from the darkest corners of our minds toward an ecstatic celebration of the lushness of language, Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream is a celebration of a world that is both sacred and cruel, a world of “Poesy Chicano style undone wild” by one of the most daring poets of our time.

Juan Felipe Herrera is a graduate of the Floricanto Generation of ’71, campesino migrant treks, and multimedia political theater experiments. He has founded percussion and jazz poetry ensembles, Chicano teatros, and poetry brigades, and has taken his various word troupes across the United States and into Mexico and Latin America for the last thirty years. He has served as editor of a number of groundbreaking small-press magazines such as Red Trapeze, El Tecolote Literario, Gato’s Journal, Bovine Interventions, and Citybender, and university reviews including Vórtice, Metamorfosis, and Naranjas y Nopales. He holds degrees from the University of California–Los Angeles, Stanford University, and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and he has received numerous awards for his writing. Recent prized novels include Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box and Downtown Boy. He is currently the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California–Riverside. He lives in Redlands, California, with his wife, the performance artist Margarita Robles.
 

"Herrera's political salvos can be surprisingly lyrical. . . . This collection puts most academic poetry to shame."—Publishers Weekly