Always Danger offers a lyrical and highly imaginative exploration into the hazards that surround people's lives - whether it's violence, war, mental illness, car accidents, or the fury of Mother Nature. In his second collection of poems, David Hernandez embraces the element of surprise: a soldier takes refuge inside a hollowed-out horse, a man bullies a mountain, and a giant pink donut sponsors age-old questions about beliefs. Hernandez typically eschews the politics that often surround the inner circle of contemporary literature, but in this volume, he quietly sings a few bars with a political tone: one poem shadows the conflict in Iraq, another reflects our own nation's economic and cultural divide. ""Always Danger"" parallels Hernandez's joy of writing: unmapped, spontaneous, and imbued with nuanced revelation.
About the Author :
David Hernandez published his first collection of poems, A House Waiting for Music, in 2003. His poems have appeared in FIELD, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, AGNI, The Southern Review, and TriQuarterly. His drawings have appeared in Other Voices, Gargoyle, and Indiana Review. Hernandez lives in Long Beach, California, with his wife, writer Lisa Glatt.
Review :
"Always Danger blends a sense of menace, of ever-present harm, with almost painterly devotion to the images central to these poems. As good books often are, this is a book of obsessions: Everyone here is hurt or maimed, has lost or is losing. We're presented with a world few would choose to live in, though many inhabit, without choice. To the extent that Hernandez is interested in offering redemption, it comes almost solely from the poet's attention to and veneration of detail, from an imagination blessed with animate language. Hernandez's achievement is the double witnessing of violence and beauty, the one unavoidable and the other, by the end, earned."--Bob Hicok, award-winning author of Animal Soul, The Legend of Light, and Insomnia Diary
"Fierce and swift and crisp, David Hernandez's poems drill their way into the real and always find something alive and surprising there. There's plenty of cleverness here, but what is special about these poems is an unusual quality of determination. Hernandez's imagination goes at the world in attack-mode--not to show off, but to discover its human depths."--Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me: Poems
"These poems--as urgent, fragile, wily as they are--go beyond the merely personal into the great world. Hernandez's patient, generous eye is on family and stranger, the wounded and the lost, the rich life of the city, its parking lots and freeways, sad yards and heavy metal. Finally, a poet who is not the center of his universe! And it's never simple, the dark joy that comes of such fierce attention."--Marianne Boruch, author of five collections of poetry, including Poems: New and Selected and two books of essays on poetry, most recently, In the Blue Pharmacy
