Recipient of the 1998 Silver Award for Poetry from Foreword Magazine.
Trochemoche means “helter-skelter” in Spanish, and this book expresses the turmoil of the barrio and the various themes that drive Luis J. Rodríguez’s poetry. Drawing on more than ten years of poems, Rodríguez writes powerfully and passionately about urban youth, family and the plight of neglected communities, while exploring the rich cultural roots of his Chicano ancestry.
Trochemoche explores recovery and personal growth, ways of knowledge, revolution, and the power of poetry. It is a cholo-stance of indigenous jazz, of roots and reckoning. In the cadence of struggle, of street talk, and the salient speech of the social outcast, Trochemoche is about new meters, new meanings, the new verse of colors, breath, and whispers at the closing of the millennium and at the mouth of the new. It expresses soul-freedom as the clarion call of the new politics. This is the poetry that takes us where we have to go.
