Arte Público Press couldn’t have put this collection out at a better time, as the seeds that Miguel Piñero and the other founders of the Nuyorican movement planted back in the 1970s have flourished and wrapped themselves around the world. I had already read, in a few different books, about 80% of the thirty-eight poems and eleven plays included in this rather handsome book, but the added attraction for me was the “previously unpublished poems” that show different sides of Piñero, who won the New York Drama Critics’ Award for Best American Play (1973-1974) for Short Eyes and a Guggenheim fellowship—for writing brutally honest plays and poetry about prison life and the streets of The Lower East Side, his home in New York City, until his death in 1988.
“To-get-her” shows a playful side of Piñero; a wizardry of syllable de/reconstruction based on the title word and the employment of dead-end labyrinthine word play. “The Lower East Side is Taking” is more regretful and melancholy, while “Rerun of ‘The Ballad of the Freaks’” shows off his pop culture fascinations, even mixing fairy tales and drug culture where…
All that glitters isn’t gold,
no surprise to know, Snow White
was no virgin.
She took a knock-out speedball tardy
and pretended to be drunk,
offered to take on the whole lot.
Everyone declined on the spot.
Paul Bunyan, John Henry and Goliath
had fucked, now walked to frail egos…
It’s no secret that Miguel Piñero lived on the fringes of societal acceptability and used this platform to fire back at the society that oppressed him and Puerto Ricans (and others) in general. The tones in his work are ever-shifting; political, comical, dangerous, tender—a universe of emotions come to life in his words. Much has been written about his limited output, due to his early death and habit of losing the notebooks in which he drafted much of his work—but I will say this: Few writers depict 1970s New York, the decade in which I became self-conscious of the world around me as a New York Puerto Rican, as crisply as Piñero does.
Taboos, such as homoeroticism, which is a recurring theme and topic in much of his work, aren’t swept under the rug, but more closely examined. Piñero’s characters have their faults and vices and problems, but they are often forgivable because they’re so truly human and prone to tragedy as marginalized underdogs. These dramas unfold in rough urban landscapes where innocent victims are forever changed by predatory impulses of crafty survivors, where fathers plot the deaths of men who wish to turn their daughters into prostitutes, where queer characters vehemently confront the suffocating strictures of homophobia. And from all of these struggles is achieved a kind of dazzling brilliance…
This makes a great gift!
To buy from Powell’s online go here: http://www.powells.com/s?kw=outlaw+pinero&class
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Xo Charlie
Excellent review! Just ordered the book. Thanks!
I so want this book!!!
I love those syllable de/reconstructions