A Sorting of the Ways: New and Selected Poems

Following his break-through first volume of poems Through the Years (2010) and its successor Roberta and Other Poems (2011) Ricardo Quinones has upped the ante with a generous selection from those earlier volumes and additions from a ready supply of new poems presented here.A Sorting of the Ways: New and Selected Poems contains such poems as The Grafting Tree a mythical marriage between a giant oak and a chair; Ten and More the record of a ten-year-olds deflating experience of the Korean War after the jubilation of 1945 and the end of WWII; To Pick a Penny another far-reaching poem about the magic qualities of a penny; and Spoiler Speech the fragile hold of civilized consciousness against the uprising of a primitive rage. The volume also announces the demise of the popular Wallet Poems mainly by virtue of their own superabundance and their replacement by a new kind of verse Bloc Notes.In the poem A New Beginning Quinones takes the gamble of expressing his own philosophical and moral desideratum as to the nature of art and society thus enacting his belief that at sometime a writer-poet must come to grips with those things he thinks essential if a society is to be reborn.