The premier Chicano poet in America returns with an experiment in time and language. Long prose-poem sequences combine with Spanish texts and English fragments that blossom in galactic proportions. Herrera's poems lift the Mexican experience beyond its borders and drop it among terrains of surviving perception, where the voices of immigrants are the echoes of future boardroom lineups. Giraffe on Fire is a challenge of poetic codes, spoken colors, and linguistic formulas. It is the poetry of an artist who has moved beyond the plugged-in circus of his discoveries to find that his writing hands are wide open to the stars.

Although Herrera describes himself as a Chicano poet, the bilingual poems in Giraffe on Fire have less to do with cultural identity than with issues of self and survival in a world marked by rapid flux. . . . His intricate narrative technique involves weaving the seemingly spontaneous grunts, howls, and imprecations of psyches undergoing forced transition.