Critical Commentary
Praise for Musings of a Barrio Sack Boy
"These wonderful, warm poems are told in a voice that lifts the characters that live in these ages from the mundane into a realm of love. We have all known such barrio neighbors, but few of us can reveal their souls as Luis Lopez does in Musings. I laughed, I cried, and I'm going to read the poems again for the sheer joy."
-Rudolfo Anaya, author of Bless Me Ultima.
"These poems are wonderful! They are filled with gentle wit and insight, skillfully drawing the reader into the sometimes bizarre but always human world of his many fascinating characters. By the time I finished reading these poems, I felt like I was a sack boy in the barrio in Albuquerque and enjoying every minute of it!"
- James Tipton, author of Letters from a Stranger, Winner of the 1999 Colorado Book Award for Poetry
Praise for A Painting of Sand
"In A Painting of Sand, Luis Lopez presents fifty high desert Abiquiu experiences rendered in pure, direct language of Zen nature poetry. Through Lopez's worak, we encounter summer storms setting dry mesas aflame with flowers, lightning striking sparks across Cerro Pedernal's dare spire, cold winds extinguishing the cottonwood's autumnal flames, mythic snakes pursuing children through the red rock canyons, and cane cholla passing from ghostly sainthood to blazing silver glory as the full moon sets and the sun rises. These and other daily miracles appear in Lopez's fine poetry – a fitting tribute to the land of Georgia O'Keefe, Thomas Merton, and countless artists and mystics from Anasazi times onward."
-John Nizalowski, contributing editor for Inside/Outside
Southwest
"A reader will find Luis Lopez's poems much like the landscape he writes about: spare, surprising, deceptively simple. But long after the reader has left the landscape, something about it remains in the mind, in the senses, in the heart. Like the grain of sand in the oyster, the poems grow lustrous, and as each poem in the collection adds another concentric layer of experience, the result is a book that's a small but lovely gem."
-Anita Skeen, author of Each Hand a Map and Portraits
