Primera Página: Poetry from the Latino Heartland
by The Latino Writers Collective
with foreword by Rane Arroyo
Softcover, $16.95
You can purchase Primera Página through Amazon.com or by sending a check or money order for $16.95 to Scapegoat Press, P.O. Box 410962, Kansas City, Missouri 64141.
Praise for Primera Página:
Primera Página is more than a book, more than an anthology. It's a community—one borne of community-building in the best sense of the term. Gathering seasoned voices (Gloria Vando's for instance) alongside “pilot pens” that are “flecha fast,” (Tomás Riley), the Latino Writers Collective in our nation's heartland (what a friend of mine calls “la América profunda”) have gifted us with an ample volume of fourteen poets, each generously represented and varied. Their “wringing palabras” all “bask in the beat” of their individual inspiration and circumstance, whether those be political, family-related, or sensual—“palabra que se disuelve entre los labios/word that dissolves between lips.”
—Francisco Aragón, Director, Letras Latinas
Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame
This first anthology, Primera Página: Poetry From the Latino Heartland, by the Latino Writers Collective, is a breath of fresh air. The voices here have verve and power. They tell it like it is without pulling punches. I am delighted by the resounding and sonorous reach of these poems. Many sing without risking that dead lull so many young poets succumb to. This is a powerful collection you will not be able to stop taking in slow, of course, the way good poetry should be enjoyed.
--Virgil Suarez, author of 90 MILES: Selected & New Poems
This is a major first anthology of Latinos in a collective who both accept and defy their identities. I grew up without an anthology of this and had to imagine it. Now the book is here and I feel less and less invisible about the value of my experiences and insights. …Reading these poems, I'm struck by how each poet sounds unique despite sharing the common language of disaffection. Some poets are young while others have scars from several decades ago. Yet there is a common wisdom shared among them, the collective, about how each voice must be heard on its own terms. This book is not a choir, but rather a gathering of singers offering world music.
--Rane Arroyo (from the foreword)