| Alfred Arteaga | HOUSE WITH THE BLUE BED | ||
HOUSE
WITH THE BLUE BED
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WINNER, 1998 PEN OAKLAND JOSEPHINE MILES AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN LITERATURE
In House with the Blue Bed, Alfred Arteaga reflects on being Chicano, poet, father, race car driver, musician, world traveler, professor. In a series of compact chapters — by turns personal, anecdotal, poetic, and political — Arteaga addresses an array of themes extracted from the prism of his personal experience.
“A fizzy Sarduyian brew, Arteaga’s House with the Blue Bed traces Chicano dislocasia where dream and reality, West Coast and western world float on a churning surface of prose, both spare and lush.” “These elliptical and trenchant essays assert the power of the poetic intelligence
in its alternative view of “things as they are.” Beneath Arteaga’s gaze,
new patterns of perception and cultural insight, at once social and artistic,
coalesce to challenge our habitual modes of understanding. The human truths
that appear astonish by their personal, experiential authority, and by
the unforeseen logic — I really mean music — of their convergence. At
the heart of Arteaga’s project is the ancient metaphor of a journey, transgressing
boundaries, toward a dark wood: of getting lost to find something.” |
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ALFRED ARTEAGA, born in East L.A., is the author of two books of poetry,
Cantos and Love in the Time of Aftershocks, editor of An
Other Tongue: Nationalism and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands,
and author of Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities. He teaches
literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Visit his website
at alfredarteaga.com.
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