Slow Lightning

"[Corral] packs many, many lines with sharp, sensual, specific imagery—this is Technicolor poetry."—Booklist

“Corral is a writer that cares both for the poetic line, but also for the bodies that he writes about, for family, legacy, culture, and what it means to be American. I go to this book again and again, and to me, it's a masterpiece.”—Ocean Vuong, NPR Morning Edition

Eduardo C. Corral is the 2011 recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, joining such distinguished previous winners as Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, and John Ashbery. The first Latino poet to win the competition, Corral is also winner of the 2011 Whiting Writers Award.

Seamlessly braiding English and Spanish, Corral's poems hurtle across literary and linguistic borders toward a lyricism that slows down experience. He employs a range of forms and phrasing, bringing the vivid particulars of his experiences as a Chicano and gay man to the page. Although Corral's topics are decidedly sobering, contest judge Carl Phillips observes, "one of the more surprising possibilities offered in these poems is joy."

From "Self-Portrait with Tumbling and Lasso"

I'm a cowboy

        riding bareback

My soul is

        whirling

above my head like a lasso.

        My right hand

a pistol. My left

        automatic. I'm knocking

on every door.

        I'm coming on strong . . .