The Fever of Being

Luis Alberto Urrea

This bilingual series of poems ranges in mood from comic to tragic, vividly dealing with events in Luis Alberto Urrea’s life inside the Hispanic and Anglo border cultures.  The book won the Western States Book Award in 1994 and a Colorado Book Award in 1995.  This is the first of three published collections of poetry by the Chicano writer, editor, and visual artist. 

“I’m taken with the brio of this book, its macho, its almost ‘feverish’ inventiveness. . . . While the poetry isn’t explicitly political, it roots in the underclass, slants toward rebellion, banditry.  Throughout, the book breathes a Mexican, Southwest American life, impassioned, closely observed, sometimes . . . very funny.”—Poetry Flash

“Once you open your eyes and ears to the bilingual poetic visions/voices of Luis Alberto Urrea, there’s no way to return to complacency. He has blocked all borders with a language that crackles and blisters—at times with rich humor, at times with a savage tension.”—Wanda Coleman

And then one day
you get up
and she’s gone.
And the burns on the pots
remind you.  And her forgotten
cream underpants in the dreamdust
under the bed remind you.  And the seat
of the toilet indicts you.  And the noise
of the silence infects you.
You try every remedy
your man’s small mind can conjure:
call old lovers.  Naked all day.  Crap
with the door open.
Defiant beer.

And the creak of your knees when you pray again
reminds you.  And the babyblue box
of homeless tampons reminds you.
And the Christmas tinsel stuck
to the back of the bookshelf reminds you.
And the dip in the mattress,
the hair in the brush,
the three year old
flower of blood
on the sheet,
and the day,
the light,
the sun,
the night, the hours, the minutes, the years
conspire to remind and remind
and remind you.
             —“Man’s Fate”

6 x 9 inches • 82 pages • ISBN 0-931122-78-3 • $9.95