Magician’s Hat: Poems on the Life of David Alfaro Siqueiros

These poems engage the life of the famed Mexican muralist Jose David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose vision of a free, generous, and artistically liberated Mexico, completely responsive to both its people and its history, unified and informed his inner and outer worlds. It is a book about the muralist’s sensibility, about the way in which his experimental art and his human concerns synthesized in his work to become his vision. Less a biography than an interpretation of one artist’s sensibility in love, war, and painting, it is an interdependent sequence that argues out its dialectic in a connected and accretive way. The result is a magical and riveting work of historiography and the lyric imagination.