Emanuel XavierRecensioni

a decent collection. i would have liked less poems per poet and more poets.

The collection can be seen as a brother to Xavier’s previous anthology, Bullets & Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry (2005) in that many of the 17 authors presented here like Dino Foxx, Andres ‘Chulisi’ Rodriguez, and the editor himself, are from the world of ‘slam’ or ‘performance’ poetry. But Xavier extends the range of the previous volume by adding more established and multiply-published authors Francisco Aragon, Rane Arroyo and others into the mix, as well as giving exposure to newer voices. The poets here, mainly of Puerto Rican or Mexican decent, represent the New York City area, California, and Texas, centers of Latino culture in the United States. Xavier is also to be commended for introducing two Argentinean poets he discovered in his travels, Walter Viegas, and Pol Ajenjo, thereby extending the conversation to the international level. Their poems appear only in Spanish; one wishes they had been translated into English to increase their accessibility. Other poets’ work in Mariposas appears in English, Spanish, or ‘Spanglish,’ and several have been translated either into English from Spanish or visa versa.

http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/poetry/01/19/mariposas-by-emanuel-xavier/