Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Active on the Chicago spoken-word scene, Rodr¡guez has appeared on a number of CD compilations and a PBS special, is the author of the memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. and the founder of T¡a Chucha press. His third collection, titled after the Spanish expression for "helter-skelter, pell mell; all over the place," takes street-tough rhythms and a flair for self-dramatization, and imbues them with a lyric sensibility, forging lines best read aloud: "I am capitalism's angry Christ, techno Quetzacoatl, toppling the temples/ of modern thievery, of surplus value in word-art/ Äexploited, anointed, and perhaps double-jointed." More prevalent are loose free-verse narratives of Rodr¡guez's post-barrio life as a poet, father and husband. Getting frisked by the cops, running into "The Animal" from a rival section of East L.A. and worries over the next generation's trials and tribulations are all taken in stride, and offset by a section of imagistic vignettes: "Poems Too Short To Braid." Despite the poet's spoken-word tendencies, many of these tender poems easily hold their own on the page: "Whose Jalisco harangues the Jalisco in my stroll?/ who lays across the ruins of Teotihuacan like rainwater;/ whose face outlines the bathroom walls of cantinas;/ who is the aguardiente that tongues my callused throat?" (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The subject matter of Trochemoche emanates from Rodríguez's experiences over the past ten years, from an East Los Angeles gang member (the fodder for the earlier controversial Always Running, Curbstone, 1993), to his more sedate role as a Chicago publisher. His poems, rebellious and unsettling, want to shake us from our social complacency (the title means helter-skelter in Spanish). The longest, and in many ways most successful, of the three sections, "My Beautiful Whisper," breaks forth in poetic discourses drenched in autobiography and rooted in reality, poignant testimonies that reflect the often brutal starkness of the contemporary Hispanic experience. Their head-on, no-holds-barred style smacks more of newspaper accounts than lyricism without succumbing to sensationalism. Much like Neruda, Rodríguez believes that poetry "touches all creation, all life" including the mundane. This collection attests to the veracity of that credo that continues the tradition of his earlier The Concrete River (LJ 5/15/91). Recommended.Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
