The Siren World

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Juan J. Morales forthcoming book of poems, The Siren World, is a collection at once intensely personal and seemlessly universal. The poems delve into the wonders and horrors of the world, and reveal the mind of a poet open to anything that may strike his widely ranging thoughts. Along with visits to his parents’ homelands of Ecuador and Puerto Rico, this very American poet spies on King Carlos V conjuring empire, envisions the murderous mobs of present-day Ambato, and the brutal death of Pizarro. Here are great migrations and conquests. Here are…abandoned Gods…bumping shoulders with our modern world. Here is a detained prisoner of a brutal regime (…buried up to my neck in the yard …I sew my lips shut with black thread…), alongside a father gingerly but powerfully removing a barbed fishhook from the finger of his son.