A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Kathleen Aguero and Marie Harris University of Georgia Press,1987.

The co-editors of A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry here undertake to represent the disenfranchised: those from minority groups whose poetry, they believe, too often is deemed peripheral to a predominantly white, male and Eurocentric literary canon. Celebrated poets, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and J. D. McClatchy, appear alongside less familiar writers, and while many pieces share common themes–loss of love or faith, despair at isolation, pleasure in communion–what are consistently notable are originality of vision and the evident desire of each contributor to avoid structural or contextual formulae. Dennis Cooper movingly details the thoughts of a male prostitute: “I daydream right through it / while money puts chills on / my arms, from this to that / grip. I was meant to be naked.” Juan Felipe Herrera challenges the American dream: “We are all assassins / coveting the warmth inside the jeweler’s castle. / I came to America.” Sorrowful, subversive, this is a compelling anthology.

–Publisher’s Weekly