Cuentos Del Centro, Spic Chic, and Ganymede!

Hello friends everywhere, old and new…

 

Wednesday, September 30^th sees the return of HISPANIC PANIC! to Nowhere, 8PM. This lineup of readers will include me, Erasmo Guerra, Maegan La Mala Ortiz, Brandon Lacy Campos, Robert Vázquez-Pacheco and cubana punk extraordinaire Cristy Road. This will be the sucker-punch to kick off Hispanic/Latino Heritage month and boy will I be busy for that, but details to follow. This post includes reviews of three books, two of which I’ve read (Cuentos Del Centro and Spic Chic) and one that published an essay I wrote called “Teenage Transformer” (Ganymede), on how I grew into an underground culture identity, and a queer Latino one, at the same time—how they’re the same thing to me. And to be published alongside David Sedaris, Edmund White, and Oscar Wilde is nothing short of—um, psychedelic!

 

 

 

 

Cuentos Del Centro: Stories from the Latino Heartland (Scapegoat Press, 2009)

 

 

As Carlos Cumpián points out in the introduction—the writers assembled in this anthology hail from diverse places and bring their regional spices to add to the literary salsa that is Cuentos Del Centro —California, Colombia, Texas, Peru. This was a revealing volume for me to read, since I’ve only experienced Latino culture on the American coasts: Puerto Rican, Colombian, and Cuban culture on the East Coast and Mexican and Central-American in the west—with sprinklings of others. The stories in this book were composed by writers in the Latino Writers Collective in Kansas City, Missouri.

 

Chato Villalobos’s opening story “Barrio Angels” begins, “Barrio Angels. That’s how we referred to our sistas from the barrio that were on the honor roll but liked kicking it with us bad boys when their papis weren’t watching.” The tales begin here and weave through myriad experiences and perspectives, from Xánath’s Caraza’s mystical and erotic fiction account “At the Café on Huanjue Xiang Street” (It traversed her; it lightly brushed her nipples and sex until it made her lose consciousness), to the very serious and enraging “Hijo con Filo” by Miguel M. Morales, which studies the inner-world of a young field worker, whose family gets sprayed with pesticide, thanks to a cruel crop duster’s pilot.

 

Some of the stories discuss intergenerational themes (Whitney Boyd’s “No Tengas Vergùenza” and Linda Rodriguez’s “Why I Can’t Draw”); others recall toxic youth and folly (Maria Vasquez Boyd’s “Lucy in the Sky”). José Faus’s “El Regreso” is a haunting an introspective look at the longing felt for fathers who travel afar to work for too long, and Nathalie Olmsted’s “The Farmhouse” illustrates the terrifying crossroads where humanity and racism intersect, as witnessed by a Mexican family seeking refuge in a white family’s farmhouse, as tornados threaten to wreak destruction and terror on the open plains of Kansas.

 

Cuentos Del Centro features many other works I wish I could elaborate on here and is a must-read for any collector of original Latino fiction, as it’s written by very different writers in varying phases of their craft and career. I’m looking forward to more, guys!  

 

 

To purchase this book, click here: http://www.amazon.com/Cuentos-del-Centro-Stories-Heartland/dp/0979129125

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Luis Chaluisan’s Spic Chic (Fly by Night Press, 2009)

 

 

The rules of poetry are created by its author, much as a criminal operates both within and away from society, as he or she sees fit. Thus, it’s no wonder that so many poets past and present have dabbled in crime and write about these adventures of subculture. Luis Chaluisan’s poems are odes—both celebratory and regretful—to his experiences as a New York-born Puerto Rican surviving on the streets of New York. And I’m not talking about the well-heeled New York of today, but of the smoldering 1970s and 1980s. (I remember living in the East Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx during the late 1970s, and anyone involved in crime who survived to write about it gets instant applause for that alone.)

 

Luis “El Extreme” Chaluisan—a musician, writer, and former news reporter—is in no denial of his controversy, as spelled out in the book’s opening disclaimer statement. Although I thought I knew what I was walking into when I read this book at the Section 13 jetty of the “Bronx Riviera” recently (Orchard Beach), I was thrown for some surprises. These twenty-plus pieces range from serious (“Johnny Boy”) to whimsical (“Surfing in the South Bronx”), and Chaluisan’s greatest effectiveness is achieved when he releases his honest emotions for public viewing—which you almost don’t expect him to do (“I slide precariously alongside her path, at once tender, then off-center”, from “Carmen Baby”).

 

In “Wilfredo the Anointed Apostle”, about a gay santero barber, Chaluisan explains, “So before we crucify him with whispered nails…homo, queer, fazzy hole…stop and think…perhaps a person’s lifestyle is really a blessing, for who are we to know God’s ways and plans…when we’re walking together, people just stop and stare…but if you could see him through my eyes, he wouldn’t be a faggot but a man.” Spic Chic is an exciting tour of jazz and salsa clubs, women of pleasure, of the island, of desperate people struggling to survive—of joy and pain—but it’s also about transformation. It’s really about becoming greater and wiser than what doom had planned for your soul.

 

 

To purchase Spic Chic, click here: http://www.amazon.com/Spic-Chic-Adventures-Last-Nuyorican/dp/1930083173/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252714904&sr=8-1

 

 

 

Ganymede: Issue #5, Oct. 2009

 

 

I have an essay published in this issue (“Teenage Transformer”) on coming of age in inner-city Latino New York and then underground/queer culture. Ganymede is a literary/art print journal by and for gay men published quarterly in New York as a paperback book.

 

This issue:

 

–EDMUND WHITE on writing gay

–OSCAR WILDE’s delicious 1889 dialogue on art, “The Decay of Lying”

–GLENWAY WESCOTT’s rare 1928 story of a little boy going to a ball in drag

–BERGDORF BOYS by Scott Hess: first of four parts serializing a complete novel, both witty and dark, about gay party boys in New York

–TEN gay poets and EIGHT gay visual artists from around the world

–SUSAN GLASPELL’s 1917 story “A Jury of Her Peers,” now a discovered text in feminist lit

–INDIE EYE returns with tips on obscure movies to rent, including the first gay Bollywood flick!

–The Paris of Our Dreams: the 19th-century transformation of Paris coincided with the birth of photography, and the rise of archival photographers who snapped parts of the city either rising or falling. Our portfolio shows these precious images.

ESSAYS: Writing Gay by Edmund White…Indie Eye (2) by Kush Varia…The Decay of Lying by Oscar Wilde…Teenage Transformer by Charlie Vázquez

POETRY by R.J. Gibson, Brian Brown, Matthew Hittinger, Michael Montlack, Ron Curlee, P. Viktor, David Bergman, Sean Patrick Conlon, Robert K. Müller, John Stahle

FICTION: A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell…Lots by Marc Andreottola…Adolescence by Glenway Wescott…Slavic Thickets: Two Stories by Boris Pintar…Bergdorf Boys (1) by Scott Hess

ART PORTFOLIO: Swan Princes: Paintings of Hernan Bas

PHOTO PORTFOLIOS: Bastien Bucquet…Luis Alvarez…Andre Bernardo…Iain Clacher…Andrea Pedretti…Charles Marville and early photographers of Paris…Josiah Shelton…Niro Taub

 

 

Ganymede #5 issue (Oct. 2009): to purchase click go to: http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=1308479

 

 

6×9” perfect-bound paperback, 344 pages
Black and white inside pages, full-color laminated covers (click each below for larger view). Design: John Stahle Graphic Design

 

 

 

Watch this short clip of me reading in NYC, courtesy of WepaTV:   http://blip.tv/file/2478867/

 

¡Besos y abrazos! 

 

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