The rough and tumble prose and life of Floyd Salas give body and guts to these poems of love and desperation in Color of My Living Heart.
Here, the seasoned boxer, street dude, ex-hippie and ex-pachuco bares his heart in a genre all but forgotten by today’s skeptic and minimalist poets. Here is love in all of its agony, deception, disillusionment, glory, and sexual euphoria. Here is love and grit, love and sweat, love and heartbreak, love and mending hearts. What Salas had not dared display in his muscular prose work, is here throbbing, uncompromising, vulnerable, and raw.
“Considering love’s many forms and fluids, Salas . . . finds that the throb of existence nearly always has a sexual component.”–Publisher’s Weekly
“Raw and uncompromising.”–Express
“Bukowski once wrote that clarity is sadly lacking in contemporary poetry. He would find it in Salas. . . The collection is a journal of love and what it means — the pitfalls, the high points, the questionings that back up in the mind like freight cars on a siding in a railroad yard. Common themes and everyday backgrounds collide and then come together in the detective work that the poet undertakes to unmask the meaning of relationship. . . His words reverberate through the ages, leaping over literary trends and schools of literature. What remains is an almost feverish devotion of the unadorned image, the bone-hard truth of what he sees, how he senses, what he gleans from the ordinary world. Color of My Living Heart is a tender notebook.”–Neeli Cherkovski, Cups Magazine
FLOYD SALAS is the critically-acclaimed author of four novels, a memoir and two volumes of poetry. His publications include Tattoo the Wicked Cross (Grove Press, 1967; Second Chance Press, 1981), winner of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship; What Now My Love (Grove Press, 1969; Arte Público Press, 1994); Lay My Body on the Line (Y’Bird Press, 1978); the memoir Buffalo Nickel (Arte Público Press, 1992), which earned him a California Arts Council Literary Fellowship; State of Emergency (1996), awarded the 1997 PEN Oakland Literary Censorship Award, and his poetry collections, Color of My Living Heart (1996) and Love Bites: Poetry in Celebration of Dogs and Cats (Mad Dog Publishing, 2006). Salas’ awards and honors include a Rockefeller Foundation Fiction Scholarship, an NEA creative writing fellowship, and two outstanding teaching awards from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University; University of California, Berkeley; University of San Francisco; Sonoma State University; and Foothill College, as well as at numerous writing conferences and at San Quentin, Folsom, Vacaville and other correctional institutions. He is the founder and president of the multicultural writing group PEN Oakland, and a former boxing coach for University of California, Berkeley.
Learn more at floydsalas.com.
