Critical Commentary

Friday and the Year That Followed:

From Ecuador to Puerto Rico to Vietnam and some points in between, this collection covers a great deal of space and time.  The language is alive and the subjects of genuine interest—an earthquake and its aftermath, folklore and folk wisdom, and the life of a soldier….In the first section of the book we're shown the devastation of an earthquake along with the kind of magic one associates with One Hundred Years of Solitude—mystical healing, capturing witches, curing imbecility.  We also get views of the specific Latino culture.  Such things seem exotic initially but they are delivered with directness and great clarity to the reader.  Throughout the collection there is striking imagery and a concrete use of detail and the language is vigorous, especially in its use of lively and appropriate verbs.  There are many poems here which are important contributions to the culture. 

—Vern Rutsala

From a mine sweeper in Vietnam, to a guard at Spandau prison; from the devastation of an earthquake in Ecuador, to witchcraft in colonial New Mexico, the poems in this ambitious first collection span time and place.  Powerful individually, it is when read all together that these poems, like the Nazca lines, really take form, creating a sweeping vista of poetic vision and beauty.

 —Lisa Chávez

In his remarkable first collection, Juan Morales dons with great enthusiasm and versatility the cloak of the muralist, fittingly painting history into myth, news into legend.  Amid these stories of witches, superstitions, earthquakes, war, jokes, and ghosts, Morales makes good on his word to push "the doors of heaven open," constructing a kind of musical simultaneity that unites the world of past, of present, of prophetic. Whatever magic we readers encounter in Friday and the Year that Followed is real, if only that it awakens us to a nearly ungraspable truth: our miraculous is-ness.

—David Keplinger