Poem by Steven Alvarez

Steven Alvarez says, “I’m a poet of rhetoric and ethnography, and I bring “outsider” linguistic perspectives to my writing. My writing speaks to the contemporary “post”-Xicano experience, amid current immigration debates that touch so many lives in the United States beyond the Southwest borderlands in the twenty-first century. I am the son of Mexican immigrants, and I grew up in southern Arizona. My aesthetic reflects the synergy that composes my hyphenated American identity, and what I deem as my Neo-Baroque Xicano experimentalism.” His novels include, The Pocho Codex: Piercing an Amurkan Poetic Historiography (Editorial Paroxismo, 2011) and its prequel The Xicano Genome: Ulises, Los Panchos, e Ysrael (Editorial Paroxismo, 2012) His poems have also appeared in Fence, Drunken Boat, Blue Mesa Review, EAOGH, Shampoo, and Acentos Review. In 2008, his poem “& So Tio & Chaley” was recognized by the Poetry Society of America as one of the best poems about Times Square. “I read this poem in the heart of Times Square for my public debut, which was covered by The New Yorker.