Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction to the Poems -- Part I -- Hunting -- Fourth-Grade Lunch -- Lion's Den -- Cast Iron -- To Sing -- Soccer Practice -- Drywall Dust -- The Call -- Part II -- After One Year of Trying -- Washing Dishes -- Inheritance -- Prayer -- Hollywood Endings -- Museum of Natural History -- Skin -- Need -- Part III -- Designated Driver -- I Make My First Delivery -- At the Entrance of a Back Alley -- Monster -- Molting -- A Wage-Claim Conference in Fresno -- At the Unemployment Office -- Wash -- Fences and Part IVThirst -- Lizard Blood -- Stones -- Diet -- 330-Pound Man Exercises -- Bowl -- Pica -- The Measuring Tape of a Dressmaker -- Last Words -- The Stones from the Water -- Part V -- After Hearing of My Father's Passing -- Ars Poetica -- Where the Sirens Go -- Open Letter -- The Language of Masa -- I Left You a Note -- Addressing a Letter to My Father -- Birthday Dinner -- He Holds Out His Hands -- Lost Letter to Kees -- Dusk
Summary
"Rhina P. Espaillat, judge of the 2014 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, describes Furious Dusk, David Campos's winning collection, as "a work whose five parts trace a son's efforts--only partially successful--to fulfill his father's expectations and--perhaps even more difficult--understand those expectations enough to forgive them." The poet's reflections are catalyzed by learning of his father's impending death, which, in turn, forces him to examine his father's expectations against his own evolving concept of what it means to be a man. The poems' speaker sifts through his past to find the speckles of memory that highlight the pressures to fit the mold of masculinity forged both by the Mexican culture of his father and the American culture he inhabits. The problematic norms of both rip the speaker in two directions as he recounts his father's severe parenting, as he explores the inability to father a child, as he witnesses human suffering, as he overeats and confronts the effects on his body, and, finally, as he realizes what it means to transcend these expectations. The speaker's epiphany frees him to reject masculine stereotypes and allows him to see himself simply as a human being. That realization, in turn, enables the speaker to see his father not only as "father," "husband," and "man," but as a citizen of Earth. Through Campos's bold imagery and accessible language and themes, he memorably adds to the continuing conversation of the effects of cultural expectations on the children of immigrant parents"--
