First Place co-winner, Best Poetry, Latino Literary Hall of Fame A poetic collage of voices, genres, and time-spaces. A display of power over language and rhythm. A postmodern performance of naked figures hanging in the nebulae of a militarized universe. A new millennium cubist manifesto against decrepit political machines. A mystic song in search of birth and love. In this new collection of poems, Juan Felipe Herrera’s natural talent for capturing the raw dimensions of reality merges with his wild imagination and technical prowess.

Things, names, places, histories, herstories, desires, wills, minds, and their effects and progeny are re-mixed, re-mastered, and re-cast into a new narrative theater. Characters in a constant and stubborn rush, appearance, disappearance, and flow–with, against, and for each other–create the fire and give birth to the hallucinatory spotted and leaf-eating, long-necked child. Exciting and original, cutting-edge and risk-taking, Giraffe on Fire is a breathtaking addition to a respected body of work by a poet not afraid to speak out about how poetry reflects the raw beauty and truth of life.