In the title story, a once-elegant hotel—now a rundown apartment building for mostly single men and a few desperate families—burns to the ground, killing seven people. City building inspector Roberto Morales had recently reviewed it and knows there was nothing wrong with the wiring, even before he’s hustled off to a “meeting” with a local mafioso. As he pounds the pavement of San Francisco’s grimy Mission District, looking for clues to the fire, he realizes the lengths to which developers will go to make another million—even as far as sending seven innocent souls to “the other barrio.”
San Francisco Poet Laureate Emeritus Alejandro Murguía imbues his mostly brown, working-class characters with the grit necessary to face every day in this collection of short fiction. Several characters eke out a living in La Mission. Others struggle in Latin American countries like Mexico and Nicaragua, where war and revolution have altered the trajectories of people’s lives—including María José, who returns to her native village after fleeing the violence of civil war. Though she has dreamed countless times of revenge, when she comes face to face with the man who held her down as she was raped by soldiers, all she can do is forgive him. “She wanted to bury the pain, erase it, start all over—the right way.”
These stories—many previously published in anthologies, journals and newspapers and now gathered into one volume—feature Latinos of the United States and depict universal themes like relationships between men and women, the privileged versus the disadvantaged and overcoming the hardships of the past.
Praise for the work of Alejandro Murguía:
“This second collection from Murguía (Southern Front, 1991, not reviewed) offers nine impassioned stories of love and regrets, all grounded in an urban Latino realism.”—Kirkus Reviews on This War Called Love
“Equal parts funny and sad, Murguía’s short stories depict, with tender and sometimes unflinching detail, love, life and growing up Hispanic.”—Booklist on This War Called Love
“A born storyteller, Murguia sustains flawlessly believable first-person narratives, which give his prose much of its warmth and nuance.”—San Francisco Bay Guardian on This War Called Love
“The tales of life in Mexico City and the Mission District … crackle with energy without losing sight of their narratives.”—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review on This War Called Love
“Murguia’s spirited writing makes the past and his family come alive. Recommended for all libraries with collections in Hispanic culture, especially those in California.”—Library Journal on The Medicine of Memory: A Mexica Clan in California
“In the city of poets, Murguía has become the activist voice of refugees and exiles—as so many of us are, even as natives—at the center of the Americas. Disguised by its sensuous intimacy, soothing and ennobling, his is a poetry that arms the resistance.”—Dagoberto Gilb, author of The Magic of Blood
“Poet, teacher, publisher, lover, literary guerrilla—Alejandro Murguía is a San Francisco treasure. And I’m not saying this because he knows where to find the best pozole. Although he does.”—Jack Boulware, Litquake co-founder
“The powerful stream of rich, diverse Spanish spoken in the United States by millions of Latinos from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, has rushed into the huge river of the English tongue in such a way that a language and a literature have been born from those troubled waters, exploring multiple alternatives and choosing many paths. These Stray Poems from Alejandro Murguía speak with all those voices, crossing linguistic borders and really going out of the way to deviate from the standard path and let the multiracial and multicultural, all-embracing Latino beat flow into the heart of English.”—Daisy Zamora, author of The Violent Foam
“Murguía with a tango unleashed, a city on fire, a rendezvous of homage, manifesto, revenge and transcendence—he is alone, without a face, yet recognizable in every body that swims through the under-streets of the City, of Paris, of Havana, of bombed-out-Here’s-and-There’s and the stripped down body of all of us. No stones are left unturned; hypnotic, alarming, ‘melodramático,’ rough-lovin’, unkempt, ‘dangerous,’ and ready to battle at the center of the scorched core. ‘I didn’t cheat,’ one poem admits. He is on trial—fire-spitter and disassembler of cultural falsifications, in ‘strange’ and romantic moods, the poems scatter truth and aim and blow and burn and rise unto the flagless sky—’. . . a country of oceans and mountains.’ Murguía gets there. Alone, because few embark on that voyage. An astonishing, brutal nakedness. Love, that is. No book like it. An unimaginable heart of and for the people—a ground-breaking prize.”—Juan Felipe Herrera, US Poet Laureate (2015-2017)
ALEJANDRO MURGUÍA, the San Francisco Poet Laureate from 2013-2017, is the author of a poetry collection, Stray Poems (City Lights Books, 2014); two story collections, Southern Front (Bilingual Review/Press, 1990) and This War Called Love (City Lights Books, 2002), both winners of the American Book Award; and a non-fiction book, The Medicine of Memory (University of Texas Press, 2002). He is the co-editor of Volcán: Poetry from Central America (City Lights Books, 2001). The founder of The Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade, he is a founding member and the first director of The Mission Cultural Center. He is a professor emeritus in Latina/Latino Studies at San Francisco State University.
