Puerta del Sol

If you like Cavafy, and I do, you will enjoy Aragon's poetry. These are poetic snapshots with depth. The specificity of the details (time, place, even the weather) gives the poems the authenticity of individual personal experience, but the emotional observations (love and loss, yearning and revulsion) speak to the universal human condition.

Francisco Aragon's verse has graced the pages of several chapbooks and innumerable literary journals not to mention anthologies published by W.W. Norton, Heyday Books and Soft Skull Press. Aragon is also the founding editor and publisher of Momotombo Press which promotes emerging Latino writers and is housed at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame where Aragon is a Visiting Fellow. His talents at translation have been utilized for a half dozen books including those by the great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Aragon's honors include an Academy of American Poets Prize and an AWP Intro Journals Project Award. With Puerta del Sol, Aragon offers us his first full-length book of poetry. And it is about time. Whether confronting terrorism on Spanish soil, memories of his late mother, or lamenting love lost, Aragon allows his images to travel from one continent to another, between English and Spanish, from hard, present tense reality to amorphous, malleable memory. Aragon's poems are stunning little mirrors that reveal the shimmering complexity of our lives and dreams. This is an eloquent collection that deserves attention. [The full review first appeared in Moorishgirl.com.]