Bad Alchemy

In this exuberant and distinctive collection Dionisio Martnez addresses topics as diverse as love the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre twentieth-century art and music and the relevance of language in an age of image. Much of Martnez''s private iconography comes from the picket-fence California community of his youth in which large eventsfrom the veneration of pop icons (Jean Harlow Ed Sullivan) to the Vietnam Warseemed to move in slow motion. As an adult the poet tries to make sense of what the child could not grasp.