Los Autorretratos Y Las Mascaras / Self-Portraits & Masks

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Stephen A. Sadow and J. Kates. As the title SELF PORTRAITS & MASKS suggests, these new poems by Isaac Goldemberg, lilke Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, exalt their internal contradictions. Evasion and self-reflection lie side by side. Some poems are simultaneously Jewish and Christian. Some are are Jewish, and some are secular. One is a 'Christian Song, ' though it is left to the reader to decide which one. These poems are syncretic in vision, seesawing between the God of Abraham and Jesus. In them, God and Jesus are engaged in ongoing argument. Man's fragile standing in the universe is being questioned, even bitterly denied. Fierce, go-to-jugular in tone, these poems are ontologically disturbing. Their tone is at once alienating and strangely familiar--from the Introduction