Customer Reviews

Loterķa Cards and Fortune Poems: A Book of Lives

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This is a brilliant collaboration between Herrera and Rodriguez. Herrera's poems, as always, are thought provoking and innovative, linguistically and intellectually, and they are a perfect match for Rodriguez's linocuts, which are also innovative and thought provoking. This is a book that you'll want to read over and over again for years to come. WOW!

"A book about innovation and tradition" is how Rupert Garcia describes this book in the useful introduction. I recommend that this is read first, because it helps one to understand the history of Loteria Cards in Mexico and the traditional iconography associated with them. They are actually the fusion of two games, Patolli a game of chance the Aztecs played, and Loteria a European Version of Bingo. In the game the name of the Loteria card is called out rather than the number. It may be a type person, an element or feature of nature, or something elses, and it is often accompanied by a phrase or poem by the caller to further identify the picture on the card. This is origin of the cards, a fusion like so many things in Mexico, has been put into a contemporary setting in this book.

Artemio Rodriguez uses a mixture of traditional iconography and modern images to produce beautiful Linocuts for the images of the Loteria Cards. They look both traditional Mexican and old (they remind me of woodcuts by Dürer), yet contemporary and modern at the same time. Each is distinct and unique.

The poems by Juan Felipe Herrera go very well with the Linocuts, and they too are a mixture of traditional Mexican, Chicano and modern subject-matter. They show that beliefs, feelings, and emotions carry over in time, space, language and culture. Some remain the same, while others change. The mix they create is in a constant state of metamorphosis, becoming undefinable, yet staying distinct.

The presentation of the book is beautiful, the cover, binding, paper, and printing are al well-done. Each page has a Loteria Cards and a poem that accompanies it. I really recommend this book. It is a thoughtful and beautiful present to give to someone who appreciates the combination of tradition, modernism, art, poetry...

I bought this book last year to give to a friend and after leafing through it, decided I couldn't part with it. Rodriguez's prints are rich, beautiful, terrifying -- but it is Herrera's words I fell in love with. Each poem is it's own mystery. These are perfect pieces, perfectly married to their accompanying images, and make one incredible poetic whole.

Cutting edge Chicano poet Juan Felipe Herrera and young master print maker Artemio Rodriguez of Michoacan Mexico combine as a dynamic duo to produce a book that is more than the sum of its gifts. The two share an obvious affinity of irrepressible hilarity in their work, a Mexican aesthetic of living with and laughing at death present in the darkest issues, the grittiest subjects, simultaneously celebrating in florid imagery in both picture and word the sometimes desperate, sometimes exhilarating vivacity of Mexican American immigrants. At the same time there's enough aesthetic difference between Herrera's hip Bay Area surrealism and Rodriguez's more folkloric technique to exercise friction between the gritty and the sublime, between the dreamlike and the quotidian that depicts well the sometimes dangerous, often moving human drama of exile, immigration and restttlement. Out of the maelstrom of the experience of millions flies this piercing poetry combined, each poem, with a striking print.