Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "Rosa Alcala's poems dwell in the liminal space between the personal and the political--poems built on the idea that 'the world exists, ' and that work to define the metaphysical and ephemeral architectures of origin, migration, nationalism, and loss. Rosa Alcala is uncompromising, wry, and brutal: all of the qualities that significant poetic works of cultural criticism require."--Carmen Gimenez Smith"'I want to know how everything changes with the price of admission, ' writes Rosa Alcala in her extraordinary new book. These poems begin at the exact point where 'the fundamental concepts of elementary navigation / become unhinged, ' as they invent a new way of talking: developing tenuous and affectionate convergences between desire and fear, love and anger--even sex, money, tradition, and the history of appearances. It's all here. What fascinates Alcala is precisely what animates her poetry: 'the mess of lost power, ' compelled at once by contradiction and complicity, yet cleaving with an unsentimental eye and an inspiring wit."--Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "If poetic episodes can act as gauges of social role-playing and role-disruption, what might lie 'outside' the roles 'we' 'inhabit?' What remains undocumented, but hardly silent? What are the sensed and projected traces of 'identity' that are ideologically eviscerated, and minimally verifiable? Rosa Alcala calls up a most magical theater when exploring these quandaries. The tipping (flash) points she constructs continuously build up toward the (touched, handled, engaged) experiential moment, all the while resisting an object-status art. This is a poetics that's prologue + epilogue to incidence, and never the 'it' itself. Sweet tin on tawny brass, flesh-toned, radio-worthy"--Rodrigo Toscano.