Open this book and you will spend time with twenty original voices: twenty poets with a clear vision of what poetry should be and do. All but one of them are living poets, over 40---members of
the "post-Paz" generation---who have published two or more books of poetry. They write in a variety of tones and styles, from introspective to concrete and quotidian. Yet if you read Mexican
Poetry Today straight through, from cover to cover, as if it were a novel, you may find that it tells a story. A story of snakes, stones, tongues, mirrors, moon, knives, feet, bones, and sea.
And a world of characters cohabit this slender volume: from Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Goya, and Borges to Virgil, Rilke, Kafka, Lewis Carroll, Freud, Dylan Thomas, Mondrian and Sylvia
Plath.
Like any good anthology, Mexican Poetry Today opens a door to the strangely beautiful and resonant, bringing the news that people die every day for lack of. It also invites readers who know
little of Mexico or its literary traditions to discover that richness. The poets in this collection come from all over Mexico, and as editor I feel compelled to sing their diversity: they are
cosmopolitan and provincial; they write in free verse and in traditional forms; they are straight and gay, of the academy and of the street; they are the grandchildren of fishermen, bankers and
Russian revolutionaries. In this Mexico, pan dulce (Mexican pastry) shares a plate with swallow's nest soup, and the rosary is said while observing Rosh Hashanah.
To borrow from one of the poets, these are poems that will shuck the dark clam of your heart. Enjoy!---Brandel France de Bravo (from the introduction to this volume)
