​Bad Mexican, Bad American by Jose Hernandez Diaz is a collection of prose surrealist poems that discuss the experiences of a Mexican American living in LA. There are poems about having a conversation on Jupiter, a man riding his bike on the ocean, a lizard man teaching a class, and so many more weird and entertaining situations. The poems I enjoyed the most were ‘Ballad of the West Coast Mexican American/Chicanx’, ‘Bad Mexican, Bad American’, ‘Insomniac Moon’, ‘The Stranger’, and ‘Bones’. And I really enjoyed the line, “I put ketchup in my breakfast burrito;” which encapsulates the two cultures meshing into one. It’s a fun and surprising read.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Rupture by Adrie Rose is a poetry chapbook focusing on the experience and time after of having an ectopic pregnancy. I particularly enjoyed the poems, ‘Rupture’, and ‘The Bell’. The poems also experiment with form through erasure and spacing.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro is a novel about an older Japanese man living in Lima where he feels suspicious of the world around him. Thus begins his tumble into insanity where he believes people are watching him, he hears birds but they’re not there, and he sees his father’s friend, Etsuko Untén, appear before him as a ghost. Katzuo loses his job at the university he works for because he’s become too old, and so he spends most of his time ambling around the streets, lost in thought, and trying to embody Etsuko Untén. Then one day, as he is on his walk and his condition has worsened, he sees a boy. Katzuo goes up to the boy, and exclaims the boy’s beauty while undressing. This causes Katzuo to be institutionalized, and a medium is brought in to diagnose his problems. It’s revealed that many of Katzuo’s hallucinations (the birds and Etsuko), are manifestations of the terribleness of the war and Etsuko’s continual desire for Japan to win.
 
The novel is full of descriptions, moments, and intriguing sentence structures that create a sense of Katzuo’s insanity. I enjoyed how there came to be a reason for what happened to Katzuo and it felt like I could understand the character fully.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara provides a strikingly deep look at Frank O’Hara’s work and his life. Most of the poems provide an almost diary-like feel to them which creates an intimate view of O’Hara’s thoughts. It seems he was consciously trying to push back on the conventional idea of what poetry was at the time, as can be seen through the continual iteration of titling many of his poems ‘Poem’. There is a wide breadth of poems that I enjoyed, though found ‘Poem [Let’s take a walk, you]’, ‘1951’, ‘Steven’, ‘Lebanon’, ‘Poem [Pawing the mound with his hairy legs]’, ‘Two Dreams of Waking’, ‘The Anthology of Lonely Days’, ‘Three Poems’, and ‘Rogers in Italy’ all to be particularly interesting. And I really enjoyed the lines in ‘Rogers in Italy’ that goes, “And now at last I am/alone again and night, at last, has come.” Throughout the poems, there are thoughts about paintings, other poets, his mood, and his sexual encounters both with men and women. Also, the essay, ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ was interesting.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5