Reviews
The poems in "We Is" are like songs on a jukebox –songs you cannot stop playing. His work is equal parts craft, musicality and arresting, soul stirring, narrative. More than once I found myself yelling " Church!" in my best (which is to say not very good) Snoop Dog voice. I also kept a box of Kleenex close by. In a world cluttered with bloodless, cliché -ridden verse, "We Is" is a much needed antidote. Let these poems into your life.
Reuben Jackson
Author of Fingering The Keys, and Scattered Clouds
Miranda has written poems that will make you dance. You will read them with the book pressed close against your chest. This collection simmers under a flame of beauty. Here are poems that strut while passing the bodega. Miranda asks the question we will all ask before we die –“How did we come to this?”I love how Miranda explores questions of identity and displacement. He knows how to slap poems onto the domino table so we never forget Puerto Rico. The sounds of his words will salsa until the extraterrestrials arrive.
E. Ethelbert Miller
Host On The Margin (WPFW 89.3 FM)
With a lyric that is at times laid back and at times furious –and with the dexterity for which he is known in the visual arts– Miranda carves, paints, and stitches portraits of the immigrant-Boricua-Latinx experience into life. His poems depict rhythms reminiscent of New York City, yet they are also uniquely DC and uniquely Boricua. They invite you to move, breathe in, and come a little closer to be wrapped up in their sensory dance.
Naomi Ayala
Author of Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations
