In his fourth full-length collection, Jose Hernandez Diaz explores the first-generation Mexican American experience in nuanced linear verse, avant-garde offerings, and deadpan absurdist prose poems.
The Lighthouse Tattoo features plainspoken pieces that reveal the Latinx experience through the lens of a socially conscious contrarian in work that melds the quotidian and the profound. Also included, of course, are experimental prose poems in the signature style and voice that contributed to the meteoric rise of this unique artist. Invoking James Tate, Gabriel García Márquez, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Albert Camus, Marosa di Giorgio, and others, Hernandez Diaz cements his place in both the poetic and surrealist traditions.
Even as it unravels mysteries and explores the strange—zebras in a zoo on the moon or English dragons on the Pacific Coast Highway—The Lighthouse Tattoo shines its light on the complex emotions of a seasoned Latinx poet. In this extraordinary volume, the titular tattoo itself becomes evidence of a trauma survived, an apt metaphor for the book as a whole. As one speaker says, “I’m trapped inside of this prose poem, but I don’t want to get out. It’s nice and cozy in here. I’m invincible.”
Table of Contents
There Is a Border Inside My Autumnal Mind
Ni de aquí, ni de allá: ni de la pinche luna
Big Wave Surfing, Women’s Basketball, Pozole and Covid-19
My Father Tells Me He Is Getting Old
The Nick Van Exel Jersey
Huevos Revueltos con Chorizo
Dear White Person Who Thinks I Charge Too Much
Dear White Person Who Says I Haven’t Experienced Racism
First Thoughts as a First-Gen Mexican American Winning a Fellowship
My Life as an Avant-Garde Painter
Dolores Park Café
Sad Clown
Barcelona, 1933
Another Life
The Art of Bullfighting
Ode to James Tate
II
Autumnal Heart
The Anniversary
The Idealist
Coyote
Abuelita’s Prayers
Dreams of Conquest
First Impressions of Hell
The British Phone Booth
The Palm Tree Piñata
The Human Tree
Trapped
New Kid in Town
The Sandlot
The Fox
The Surfer
Sunday Waves
III
The Lighthouse Tattoo
García-Márquez, the Rooster
Albert Camus, the Alien
The Legend of the Fall
My Battle with an English Dragon
Meeting Cal Ripken Jr for Coffee One Morning
The Fortune-Teller of My Youth
The Immortal Ones
El Boxeador
Free as a Mime
Life of a Poet
Antonio Aguilar, the Rooster
The Blue Rooster and the Orange Moon
Meeting Pancho Villa at a Park on the Southeast Side
“Populares” Gamesa Cookies
Little League, America
One Hundred Years of Gratitude
IV
The Moon, 2050
The Man and the Dragon
An Ode to the California Burrito
The Fairgrounds in the Rain
Guisados
La Libertad
El Tío in the Mars Volta Shirt
Heredities