Carlos Hiraldo

In this luminous first collection, Carlos Hiraldo knocks down the bland edifice of contemporary poetry and replaces it with real poems that resound and shock and illuminate. As Machu Picchu grows from the mountain, gathers itself stone by stone and bursts into the sky, so these poems take the stuff of life and raise up a new, vibrant city built on love, poverty, racism, sweetness, violence and all the manifold experiences of a son of immigrants grappling with the urban environment. Uniquely American yet universal, both personal and collective, Machu Picchu Me dramatizes what other works merely disclose—that individual experience forms the shared collective of humanity.