When Living Was a Labor Camp (Camino del Sol)
"The mail addressed to Occupant/ wants to bury me cheap,/ wants to sell me a family album/ or Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopedia/ on the installment plan./ Not one letter offers what I want/ or need: a set of retread tires/ a gold crown for that top left molar,/ that 49ers jacket my son saw at the mall." Garc!a's debut collection renders three generations worth of detached anger and small pleasures with an unerring eye. Men grope and cajole awkwardly, women klatch over half-gallons of burgundy and contemplate repeating their mistakes. From lives based around picking fruit in the California fields (Garc!a was born in a San Joaquin valley migrant labor camp) to trying to get out of the subsidized "blue roof" apartment complex ("the top 10%/ of the poor, a pink-collar ghetto"), the people of Garc!a's poems are filled with yearning, sass and unrealized potential. Some, like the poet, get to college and beyond. Some get "repatriated," "sped... away to Zacatecas, to Guanajuato,/ the border's membrane just a breath away." Although the poems too often end in sentiment, such moments often seem more of an exhausted collapse than a failure of apprehension, since the characters within are sketched with such authority. Written mostly in English, but slipping bilingually into Spanish, Garc!a's poems demand to be addressed by name. (Nov.)Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.