Then She Kissed El Paco's Lips Now! Or April in DeKalb

Ric Amezquita's Then She Kissed El Paco's Lips Now! Or April in DeKalb makes you wonder if you've entered another world, or perhaps have begun to see this one clearly for the first time. "Unknown is everywhere," he writes, calmly subversive. In whatever ways he inhabits these poems-as a bewildered Chicano kid in the Air Force; a woefully underpaid, traveling teacher; a bored-to-tears bureaucrat, Villista, curandero, and small-town sage-Ric is someone I want to ride along with, a man whose songs range from street corner cries of political outrage to lullabies of almost unbearable tenderness. These are poems noctambulous, dream pieces, icons of two sides and two languages and two places at once, toes that hold the world, songs of Chihuahua and cries of Nigeria, Jesus' last thoughts and snakes uroboros, goddesses of nourishment and cool corpses of Elvis - all originals set out by an original, a 'pilot, co-pilot, navigator, / nose, dorsal, waist, tail, ball turret-gunner / and now bombardier . . . Softly fall the balms of poetry - no need to duck and cover. This is Ricardo Mario Amezquita's first book. He is a poet that will become known rapidly!