Setting
Setting in this collection is very important. The environment in which the author is raised and goes on to express his creativity is fundamental to not just his outlook, but the whole structure and framework of the overarching narrative connecting all the disconnected parts together. Imagery put to use to convey setting kicks off very early in the volume, a mere three pages in:
“My great-grandfather’s house always reminded me of a ranch, the oppressive heat of the San Joaquin Valley, the large wagon wheel leaning against the standing mail box, the way the long, tan, stucco building hugged the ground. I expected tumbleweeds to roll by, a rattlesnake to be coiled seductively in the flower bed’s rocks.”
Character
The author makes efficient use of imagery in a passage in which he conveys significant information about both his mother and his father. In just a few short lines, pregnant with meaning, the imagery distills an entire marital history into one striking description of two different people:
“My father has shown me pictures of what my mother looked like before they were married — long slick black hair, the curved nose of a Mexican, lips that pressed together too tightly. My mother was everything my father wasn’t: tall, arrogant and free.”
Landmarks
“Conquering Immortality” is found in the section of the book after it has transitioned from prose to verse. It is a rather long poem dominated by passages of imagery which connect the Egyptian movie theater in Los Angeles to ancient Egypt to hospitals in the age of AIDS. The opening of the poem sets the stage for this wealth of imagery to come:
“Down on Hollywood Boulevard,
past the McDonald’s,
between Numero Uno Pizza
and the boarded-up Ernesto’s restaurant,
lies a ruin.
In its time,
the Egyptian
was a palace,
a movie temple.”
Dear Richard
“Dear Richard” is a poem that stands as a tribute to another landmark in the author’s life: the title character. It is the story of a friendship that began in elementary school but falls hard on the asphalt of regrets later in life. The imagery of the boyhood play of two kids destined to grow up into homosexual men is simultaneously touching and appropriately offbeat:
Back at school, morning ritual was the boy’s restroom
and I always made you late, made you do Mae West,
big wrists bent on jutted hips. "Why don’t you come up
and see me sometimes? Is that a pistol in your pocket?"
