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.ht... ( )