My father was a Toltec and selected poems, 1973-1988

"Ana Castillo has a deserved reputation as one of the country's most powerful and entrancing novelists, but she began her literary career as a poet of passion and uncompromising commitment. This collection brings back into print the best of her early work, including selected poems from The Invitation and Women Are Not Roses and the entire text of her landmark 1988 collection, My Father Was a Toltec. Whether invoking her origins as the daughter of a street warrior, a member of the Toltec gang in Chicago, or defining her own lyrical positions on a variety of social, political, sexual, and esthetic issues, Ana Castillo's poetic voice is unmistakably her own - and will be immediately recognizable to the lovers of her fiction."
"Presents lyrical, streetwise, frequently autobiographical poems, some in English and others in Spanish, including a new, never before published work."
"Mixing the lyrical and the colloquial, the tender with the tough, Ana CAstillo has a deserved reputation as one of the country's most powerful and entrancing novelists, but she began her literary career as a poet of uncompromising commitment and passion. "My father was a Toltec" is the sassy and street-wise collection of poems that established and secured Castillo's place in the popular canon."@en