Today's Latino poetry scene is bursting at the seams. While Latino poetry has played an important role in establishing Latino letters, surprisingly only a few scholars have spent time analyzing its form. The first of its kind, Formal Matters in Contemporary Latino Poetry pulls back the curtain on how the poets Julia Alvarez, Rhina Espaillat, Rafael Campo, and C. Dale Young use formal structures such as meter, rhyme, and line break to affect our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about the world we inhabit. With original interviews, this imaginative book explores how these poets add something to reality with their creations.

Bringing together 15 scholars of Latino popular culture, this book makes visible a range of material objects and intellectual products out there that capture the myriad and infinite experiences of Latinos. The contributors identify a contemporary scene whereby the massive presence of Latinos in the United States is actively shaping American culture. There are a multitude of narrative media forms created by and that feature Latinos in the twenty-first century. This proliferation of diverse media formats by and about Latinos extends into film, television, animated cartoons, comic books, Internet, and video games. Using the methods and theories of aural-visual studies (film, animation, and TV), visual-textual studies (comic books) and approaches that typify digital and Internet analyses, this volume captures in all its complexity and nuance this century of multimediated Latinos.

Here, Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher Gonzalez offer a thought-provoking conversation on the history of Latinos in the pro football leagues. As they weave their way through significant points where culture, politics, and history congeal (an early twentieth century era of Brown Color Lines, the Great Depression, WWII, birth of television, Civil Rights struggles, the twenty-first century Latino demographic explosion, among others), Aldama and Gonzalez thread together an alpha-to-omega, all-encompassing story of Latinos in the NFL. They push hard at issues such as racial prejudice, including why Latinos have historically had to cross into the Canadian Leagues to prove themselves to white American officiators and the glaring omission of prominent Latino names honored within the hallowed interiors of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Encyclopedic in scope and powerfully pointed in its analysis, they put the spotlight on the significant contribution made by Latinos in the history of pro football.

This is the first book to explore the multitude of narrative media forms created by and that feature Latinos in the twenty-first century - a radically different cultural landscape to earlier epochs. The essays present a fresh take informed by the explosion of Latino demographics and its divergent cultural tastes.

Today's Latino poetry scene is incredibly vibrant. With original interviews, this is the first meditation on the thematic features of such poetry. Looking at how Julia Alvarez, Rhina Espaillat, Rafael Campo, and C. Dale Young use structures such as meter, rhyme, and line break, this study identifies a poetics of formalist Latino poetry.