Poetry. Latino/a Studies. Alarcon's poems in SONNETS TO MADNESS AND OTHER MISFORTUNES/SONETOS A LA LOCURA Y OTRAS PENAS are written in the liberating Hispanic sonnet vein inaugurated by ONE HUNDRED LOVE SONNETS by Pablo Neruda. Breaking away from traditional rhyming schemes and speaking in the free running language of concrete images, various poetic currents meet and mix in response to the present Latino conjuncture in the United States, and to the human condition generally. "...Alarcon is the dark humming bird, alone, still and yet in motion in the arc of time" --Juan Felipe Herrera. Spanish, with English on facing page, translated by Francisco Aragon.

Author City: DAVIS, CA USA

Francisco X. Alarcón (born in Los Angeles, in 1954, and raised in Guadalajara, Mexico) is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, and a number of books of bilingual poetry for children. He has won many awards and fellowships, including the Danforth and Fulbright fellowships, and the 1993 Carlos Pellicer-Robert Frost Poetry Honor Award, the 1993 American Book Award, the 1993 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and the 1984 Chicano Literary Prize. In April 2002 he received the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association (BABRA) in San Francisco. He teaches at the University of California, Davis.