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Home > Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera: Selected Poems from Half of the World in Light

Juan Felipe Herrera is the recipient of a 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award for Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press, 2008).


  Selected Poems from
Half of the World in Light


A Certain Man[Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way] •  Crescent Moon on a Cat’s CollarShe Wants the Ring Like He Wants the Suit of Scars/But3:45June Journals 6-25-88Follow RóżewiczWater Water Water Wind WaterLet Me Tell You What a Poem Brings
     
     
    A Certain Man

The man over there
with educated fingers and fast
     clouds
around his flag
rolls his shirt sleeves & calls
a taxi from church . . .
His eyeteeth clap like his family
for an encore of southwest earth
wolfed with fever
. . . Skilled and styled to believe
that Moctezuma blood & spirit
. . . are dead, as he pumps
a book through his ears.
Inside his stomach roast
meat (buttered in
     philosophy)
makes yellow drops
on his hide overboil down
to his buttons.
Only heavy fur pulls
his head to a pillow
rusting completely overnight
. . . like his prayer.
   

LISTEN

  Juan Felipe Herrera reads "A Certain Man" (1:12)


Copyright © 2008 by Juan Felipe Herrera. All rights reserved.

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