The poems in Manuel Paul Lopez's The Yearning Feed, winner of the
2013 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, are embedded in the San
Diego/Imperial Valley regions, communities located along the
U.S.-Mexico border. Lopez, an Imperial Valley native, considers La
Frontera, or the border, as magical, worthy of Macondo-like
comparisons, where contradictions are firmly rooted and ironies
play out on a daily basis. These poems synthesize Lopez's knowledge
of modern and contemporary literature with a border-child
vernacular sensibility to produce a work that illustrates the
ongoing geographical and literary historical clash of cultures.
With humor and lyrical intensity, Lopez addresses familial
relationships, immigration, substance abuse, violence, and, most
importantly, the affirmation of life. In the poem titled "Psalm,"
the speaker experiences a deep yearning to relearn his family's
Spanish tongue, a language lost somewhere in the twelve-mile
stretch between his family's home, his school, and the border. The
poem "1984" borrows the prose-poetics of Joe Brainard, who was
known for his collage and assemblage work of the 1960s and 1970s,
to describe the poet's bicultural upbringing in the mid-1980s. Many
of the poems in The Yearning Feed use a variety of media,
techniques, and cultural signifiers to create a hybrid visual
language that melds "high" art with "low." The poems in The
Yearning Feed establish Lopez as a singular and revelatory voice in
American poetry, one who challenges popular perceptions of the
border region and uses the unique elements of the rich border
experience to inform and guide his aesthetics.
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