Notes On The Assemblage

"The latest collection from Juan Felipe Herrera, the nation’s new poet laureate, covers an expansive range of forms: elegies for lost friends, long polyvocal narratives, ekphrastic poems, language splintered into shapes. Frequently profound and often furious, the collection is at its most agonized when Herrera rages against an epidemic of unjust deaths: “& your body’s / on the fence & your ID’s in the air & the shots / get fired.” He even fits danger and sorrow into white space: you throw a stone i throw a stone i throw a stone you throw a stone then a rocket a rocket comes down"