Customer Reviews

Names Above Houses (Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry)

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Oliver De La Paz's prose poems are beautiful. There are lines in here that stop you cold: The harbor lights close like a sequined hand; she blesses the room with her blue arcs. The prose poems are a narrative, the poems have the shape and allure of photographs in a family album, of a boy who flys and of his family. I love the fact that the prose poems "hover" at the top of the page, echoing the desire of the boy to soar.

With this book, I have no desire to display any critical/theory skills. Let others do that. I want to remember the pleasue this book brought me: turning to the next page; highlighting specific lines; bending back the covers; calling my friends to read them a poem. This is a gift I rarely recieve.

All I can say is WOW. I went to hear Oliver de la Paz read from his book . . . he's an incredible reader. What's surprising about the book is how tight the prose poems are in their craft and language. There's a tragic whimsy in the poems--I laughed aloud at times, but often wondered at what cost was my laughter? This book has something important to say about the immigrant experience without the message being preachy. You've got to get this book, teach this book, walk the streets with this book under your arm.

This collection about an invented family, Maria Elena, Domingo, and Fidelito, the son who sprouts wings, has a lucid dream-like quality, especially in the wonderful prose poems that string togethr the narrative of the book. Oliver has a real gift for drawing the reader in with painterly images and surreal, but gut-wrenching, emotional language. From "When Fidelito is the New Boy at School:"
"Fidelito gazes outside. There are other milder distractions: some of the children eat their shirts and some burst into rain. A road burns into a corner. In the power lines above the playground, a grackle's steel eye murders the earth."
A fantastic debut - can't wait for his next book!

just finished it and i'm reading it again...tight lines, beautiful metaphors, what a talent....i look forward to his next collection...a fantastic debut for this up and coming gay poet!!!

like the sages of old who looked to the clouds for direction and insight, so too does de la paz turn his attention skyward in this beautiful collection of prose poems. this book is the story of fidelito, young filipino who flies over the ocean to arrive in the united states--but his journey is universal, speaking to the immigrant's struggle of leaving the beloved homeland and persevering in a new one. flight as metaphor is skillfully handled by this poet who elevates bird imagery beyond fantasy and fancy and into the complex levels of transcendence and acculturation. very few poetry books can be read as a poem-by-poem narrative--i can think of only rita dove's "thomas and beulah" in which each poem is also an individual testament to the power of the word and the craft of the wordsmith. a stunning debut.

also recommend: eugene gloria's "drivers at the short time motel"