by Alejo Sierra HUIZACHE has become, according to several among its small crew of editors, designers, proofreaders and support staff, the nation’s leading Latino literary magazine, easily home to world-class poetry, fiction, and essays from the original American West. Subscribers and long-time readers of the seven-year-old publication are thrilled, they say,  at the launch yet another blockbuster issue featuring writers from the established Latino literary cannon and, as always, new voices with cutting-edge talent impossible to ignore.   “Today, the West and Southwest are exploding with art and culture rooted in centuries of tradition and fueled by history and a new contemporary culture. The cities that once circumscribed our western frontier—El Paso, San Antonio, Chicago, Denver, Tucson, Austin, San Francisco, Juárez, San Diego, Fresno, and Los Angeles—are pounding with life,” says HUIZACHE founding editor Dagoberto Gilb, an acclaimed writer who also directs th...

Review by Mike Sonksen Poet and professor Martin Espada’s latest book, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed , takes its title from a line in a Walt Whitman poem. Published by Norton, the 34 poems in this collection carry on the Whitmanian tradition of paying tribute to the everyday American and those who are usually in the shadows. Espada teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and his register deftly oscillates between calls for social justice, cataloging 21st Century America and coping with the death of his father. Divided into five sections, the book is dominated by elegies, transcendent images and subtle humor simultaneously. The titles of the five sections also reveal his poetic aims: Part 1 is “Vivas to Those Who have Failed”; Part 2 is “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World”; Part 3 is “Here I Am”; Part 4 is “A Million Ants Swarming Through His Body”; and Part 5, “El Moriviví.” Part 5 is the cycle of poems dedicated to his father. The titles of the poems themselves...