Bad Alchemy: Poems

In this exuberant and distinctive new collection, Dionisio Martinez, winner of a 1993 Whiting Award for Writers, 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 Martinez's private iconography comes from the picket-fence California community of his youth, in which larger events - from the veneration of pop icons (Jean Harlow! Ed Sullivan!) to the Vietnam War - seemed to move in slow motion. As an adult, the poet tries to make sense of what the child could not grasp.

Perhaps most poignant of all are the poems that reflect Martinez's sense of displacement as a Cuban exile ("I hold my life savings in this hand/No matter where I go, I carry foreign currency.").