Canto Hondo / Deep Song

Canto hondo / Deep Song honors the Andalusian deep lyric, or canto hondo, poetry of famed Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca through rich and expressive poems. Francisco X. Alarcon deftly places Spanish and English side-by-side in this bilingual collection that is a modern meditation on love, self, loss, and universal truths.

In this new collection, Alarcon creates poetry with roots in Gypsy songs clapped out in the distinctively short rhythms of flamenco music. Each page lifts the heart and stirs the soul by delving deep into the struggle for self and sexual identity.

Canto hondo / Deep Song includes 106 poems divided into four sections that articulate struggle, otherness, and the meaning of the poetic landscape. Like Lorca, Alarcon seeks out the fault lines where the lyric and the political bleed productively and proactively into one another.

An important voice in Chicano and GLBT poetry, Alarcon writes with a complex, emotionally powerful style that is accessible to students and all lovers of poetry and poetic traditions.

Francisco X. Alarcon teaches at University of California, Davis, where he directs the Spanish for Native Speakers Program. He is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, includingFrom the Other Side of Night / Del otro lado de la noche: New and Selected Poems,Borderless Butterflies / Mariposas sin fronteras, Of Dark Love, andSonnets to Madness and Other Misfortunes. He is also an award-winning author of six books of bilingual poems for children.