FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE NIGHT/DEL OTRO LADO DE LA NOCHE

From the mid-'80s on, Alarcón's eight books of verse in English and Spanish made him a well-known Chicano poet, and one of the first to write poems about love between men. This ample selected makes room for all Alarcón's projects, which combine Chicano and gay activism, personal poems about gay desire, work addressed to the Spanish-speaking hemisphere and to Mexico's indigenous heritage, and responses to specifically Californian places and events, like the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, to which Alarcón devotes a sequence. (He has also published bilingual verse for children.) Most of his poems combine simple diction with narrow lines; most appear in Spanish and in English, though some are printed without translation and others combine the languages: "un beso/ is not just/ a kiss." Some of these short-lined poems (like some of Langston Hughes's) seem designed for a broad audience; others (again like Hughes's) practice an appealing late-modernist minimalism, as in "Potent Seeds": "few corn/ kernels/ enough// to turn/ anger/ around." The series "Snake Poems" draws heavily on Nahuatl words and Aztec mythology (helpfully glossed at the back). Alarcón (who teaches at the University of California-Davis) concludes with two series of love poems in Spanish, almost all of them sonnets, departing from his earlier short lines: these fiercely erotic poems sound much better in Spanish, perhaps because the English versions are translated by another hand (Francisco Aragón). The critic Manuel de Jesús Hernández-G. sums up Alarcón's career in an admiring afterword; the volume also includes a short bibliography. (Mar.)

Forecast: Alarcón's work is in more familiar modes than the other heavy hitters (like Juan-Felipe Herrera) in Arizona's series. This big book should cement his appeal for anyone interested in Chicano and West Coast Latino writing and activism, on campus and off.