[Note: This review is the third in a series. For the first two reviews click here and here.]

Juan Felipe Her­rera, Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems

In my expe­ri­ence, novel-​weight new and selected col­lec­tions of poetry offer two routes of approach. One is to read them as we read antholo­gies or jour­nals: as pools of poems we can dip into as our whims inspire or our needs demand. The other is to read straight through, to see what sense we can make of the whole. When we read the first way we read for the poems; when we read the second way, we end up (inevitably, I’ve found) read­ing for the poet.

I men­tion this because I sus­pect the dif­fer­ences between these two approaches matter more than usual for a book like Half of the World in Light, Juan Felipe Herrera’s col­lec­tion of new and selected poems. I can tell you with full con­fi­dence that the story of Half of the World in Light is a story of Her­rera fash­ion­ing him­self as a self-​consciously Chi­cano poet, and yet that descrip­tion, accu­rate as I am con­vinced it is, will tell you noth­ing about a poem like “6:01 am,” from Herrera’s 1996 book Love After the Riots: