A Rush of Hands

A Rush of Hands
By Juan Delgado
71 pp. / 6.12 in x 8.00 in / 2003
Paper (978-0-8165-2255-2)

Series
- Camino del Sol

Related Interest
- Poetry

The whispers of buried lives. The silence of a growing resistance. The stigma of poverty. In haunting images, Juan Delgado explores the boundaries we cross daily.

These poems deal

A Rush of Hands takes its title from the desperate act of reaching out to claim the treasures spilling down from a broken piñata. For Juan Delgado, the image becomes a stunning metaphor for triumph and heartbreak as he gathers in his third book of narrative poems the bittersweet journeys of Mexicans and Chicanos coming to terms with shattered dreams and compromised desires. . . . A Rush of Hands is less about the offering of treats than about the smashing of the vessel. Though beautiful lines of poetry abound, the reader will be amazed by the harsh realities that inform them.

—El Paso Times

honestly with the realities of urban life, whether dramatizing the effects of drive-by shootings, unfolding a labor protest that "spreads across the city like a prayer," or summoning a ghostlike immigrant damned to retrace his journey across the border. Daily and historical struggles are elevated to the level of myth. Yet, amid these poems there are images of life and love: a girl leaving hickeys rich as chocolate, a boy pledging to rescue his mother from poverty, a man studying the desert ground for tracks signaling immigrants in distress.
Delgado is unflinching in showing us the harshness surrounding the lives he cherishes, and with resonant details and lyrical language he urges us to examine those lives-and ultimately our own. A Rush of Hands is a spellbinding book that will captivate both the ear and the heart.

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