Olive women: [poems]

Somoza, Joseph

San Marcos Press

Out of This World is an homage, a memoir, of the Spain Joe Somoza left behind as a child. It's a celebration of his new life in this country with his wife Jill and their three children. The book opens with some lines from an Asturian folk song, "the loves that you had / at the seashore, / the loves that you had / you can never forget," forming a motif for the deceptively simple poems about a man’s life time of loves. It’s his world we enter, seeing, hearing as if through an open window, carried away from our own world by his ironic, humorous voice.
"The poems here ring, they are full of guileless humor and honest wisdom, and they remind you that even the most mundane parts of our lives can be poetry. “In the simple things, he manages to challenge the complexities of life, calling upon his control of words to cull forth a moment of intense beauty." —Luis J. Rodriguez

Out of This World: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Cinco Puntos Press

A collection of disarming poems by an Austrian American that "speaks" like map ponderings along the route of blue highways. His slightly estranged journey follows neighborhood streets to downtown hotels and interstates toward a zen that is not Zen, but found by singing in a lawnchair in a backyard in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Scenes and events of daily life are recorded from a still center amid the flux of our vida loca. With a language precise in construction, the agile wit of these poems conveys a conversation with the Muse of glimpse and sagacity. Reading Joe Somoza's poems opens us up like an encounter with classic Chinese poets such as T'ao Ch'ien or Li-po--within domestic observance are the quiet profundities which cause even the dust to glow.

Sojourner, So To Speak

La Alameda Press

Cityzen is a collection of contemplative poems written while sitting in the backyard, the writer having retired from the busyness of the world and, thus, with an eavesdropper's perspective on the noisy commerce carrying on around him, but muted by bird chirps, leaves soughing in the wind, his own reflections, and the music of the words themselves. "Images limn ideas, never give away. Ideas are also kept at bay by ironic flicks of talk, fragments of conversation, questions left asking, no explication. The 'voice' in these wry, seemingly casual poems recognizes (ruefully) the search for Something Meaningful, but faces it off with wit-twitting words in a perverse inclination to question its own usages."--Madeline Tiger

Cityzen: Poems

History & Criticism

From the foreword, "Freight Train": "Being an immigrant from Spain who spoke mostly Spanish but who wanted to become full-fledged American, I also wanted to make my poems from ordinary, spoken English, without excessively rhetorical devices, the kind of language spoken by my first heroes in America, my uncle Arthur and his buddies who would meet at his gas station regularly to shoot craps, drink Ballantine Ale, and recall their youthful adventures as merchant seamen, the 'real language of men,' as William Wordsworth called it. This would be a natural American-English language that an ordinary American in a heightened state of emotion might actually speak, a language heightened just enough to draw attention to itself but not so much that it would sound artificially 'poetic,' the kind of language a later hero of mine, Jack Kerouac, used."The TreesSitting here among my friendsthe trees, I feel theirquietude, the gratitudethey show by holding outtheir limbs, generouslyallowing the moss to growon them, and squirrels and birds tobuild nests in their crowns.They don't seem to mind mysitting here, maybe sensinghow much I value theircontemplative nature,their general satisfactionwith the way things are.Rooted to their one placein the woods, they don'tcrave something better,nor complain about the weather.They stand tall and straight,side by side acceptingwhatever comes.Joseph Somoza lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico, with his wife of fifty-plus years, the painter Jill Somoza.

As Far As I Know