When We Were Water

In Raúl Sánchez's When We Were Water, selections from his books All Our Brown-Skinned Angels and When There Were No Borders travel to us with abundant new work that continues to experiment in forms and shapes, with odes and acrostic poems, visions and flashbacks, elegies and spirit-journeys, but always with humor and human vitality and a golden thread connecting to Latin roots. This work is free and playful, jazzy and up close, exploding with intensity. These are questing poems, liberation poems, devotional

poems, ecstatic poems, comic poems, sincere and lived and opening out.

-Douglas Cole, author of The Cabin at the End of the World

With his new poems, Sánchez expands his everyman vision by focusing closer to home-he tends the garden, washes the dishes, kills a spider, gazes at the stars, and records his dreams. He sees the people and remembers the history most of us overlook. He immerses himself in the natural world. All the while, Sánchez builds on the ground he has previously staked out-celebrating and memorializing family, moving seamlessly between cultures and languages, and believing in the power of poetry to save us.

-John Burgess, author of Punk Poems