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nuhafariha's review against another edition
4.0
An homage to Little Havana and Cuba, a love letter to a place the author can never visit, what it means to call home when you can no longer see it.
hmetwade's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
4.0
snowmaiden's review against another edition
5.0
A friend passed this book along to me, and one day I picked it up and started reading and was entranced by the deceptively simple narrative poems I found inside. Blanco grew up in Miami, part of a large extended family of Cuban exiles, and while there are plenty of poets writing about childhood memories, the poems in this collection are chock full of sensory details, making me feel that I had witnessed Blanco’s childhood firsthand. For example, here’s the opening stanza of “Mother Picking Produce”: “She scratches the oranges then smells the peel,/ presses an avocado just enough to judge its ripeness,/ polishes the Macintoshes searching for bruises.” By the end of this poem, I was ready to travel to Miami and visit a fruit stand myself!
I was especially surprised when I belatedly realized that this collection is almost 20 years old. A lot of poetry collections from the 90’s feel dated today, but this one is full of power and immediacy.
I was especially surprised when I belatedly realized that this collection is almost 20 years old. A lot of poetry collections from the 90’s feel dated today, but this one is full of power and immediacy.
yagorlreggie's review against another edition
4.0
thinking about when I met Richard Blanco and had a workshop class with him while I was involved in a community group in my adolescence (he lived right down the road from where we were staying, a wild memory), remembering how he had read to us excerpts from this collection and some others, how his way of reading his poetry was so deliberate, but tender and heartfelt.
“She holds up red grapes to ask me what I think,
and what I think is this, a new poem about her-
the grapes look like dusty rubies in her hands,
what I say is this: they look sweet, very sweet.”
struggling to remember spanish words I might have never learned, but context clues are helpful enough to figure it out :)
“She holds up red grapes to ask me what I think,
and what I think is this, a new poem about her-
the grapes look like dusty rubies in her hands,
what I say is this: they look sweet, very sweet.”
struggling to remember spanish words I might have never learned, but context clues are helpful enough to figure it out :)
serenaac's review against another edition
5.0
Richard Blanco‘s City of a Hundred Fires is a collection published by the University of Pittsburgh Press about the Cuban-American experience, which won the 1997 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. The collection is broken down into two sections and each poem contains not only English, but also Spanish phrases, which readers may or may not know offhand. Readers who are bilingual will have little trouble, though those who have a working knowledge of Spanish or don’t will be able to gather what Blanco is getting at from context clues. Poems are either in traditional short narrative lines or in longer, more paragraph-like lines, but each tells a story, reveals a memory, and explores a bit of the Cuban-American experience.
“Crayons for Elena” on page 13 is one of the most poignant poems in the collection as it uses the box of 64 crayons to illustrate the differences in skin tones and cultures of the people the narrator encounters and the colors that represent elements from the narrator’s own culture, including pinatas and mangoes. “. . . All these we wore down to/stubs, peeling the paper coating further and further, peeling and sharpening/until eventually we removed the color’s name. This is for leaving the box in/the back seat of my father’s new copper Malibu, the melted collage, the butter/” It seems that though these differences confuse the narrator and cause discomfort, but eventually, these differences are forgotten and life moves beyond those variations and instead absorbs the similarities, “melting them into a collage.”
Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2011/04/city-of-a-hundred-fires-by-richard-blanco.html
“Crayons for Elena” on page 13 is one of the most poignant poems in the collection as it uses the box of 64 crayons to illustrate the differences in skin tones and cultures of the people the narrator encounters and the colors that represent elements from the narrator’s own culture, including pinatas and mangoes. “. . . All these we wore down to/stubs, peeling the paper coating further and further, peeling and sharpening/until eventually we removed the color’s name. This is for leaving the box in/the back seat of my father’s new copper Malibu, the melted collage, the butter/” It seems that though these differences confuse the narrator and cause discomfort, but eventually, these differences are forgotten and life moves beyond those variations and instead absorbs the similarities, “melting them into a collage.”
Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2011/04/city-of-a-hundred-fires-by-richard-blanco.html
abetterbradley's review against another edition
4.0
I'd already fallen in love with Richard Blanco's story when it was announced he'd recite an original poem at the inauguration. After reading his poetry, my love is still there. This is the poetry you think of, rhyming couplets and such but beautiful prose poems that tell slice of life stories. My favorites were "324 Mendoza Avenue, #6" and "A Note About Sake".
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