Critical Commentary
Friday and the Year That Followed:
From Ecuador to Puerto Rico to Vietnam and some points in between, this collection covers a great deal of space and time. The language is alive and the subjects of genuine interest—an earthquake and its aftermath, folklore and folk wisdom, and the life of a soldier….In the first section of the book we're shown the devastation of an earthquake along with the kind of magic one associates with One Hundred Years of Solitude—mystical healing, capturing witches, curing imbecility. We also get views of the specific Latino culture. Such things seem exotic initially but they are delivered with directness and great clarity to the reader. Throughout the collection there is striking imagery and a concrete use of detail and the language is vigorous, especially in its use of lively and appropriate verbs. There are many poems here which are important contributions to the culture.
—Vern Rutsala
From a mine sweeper in Vietnam, to a guard at Spandau prison; from the devastation of an earthquake in Ecuador, to witchcraft in colonial New Mexico, the poems in this ambitious first collection span time and place. Powerful individually, it is when read all together that these poems, like the Nazca lines, really take form, creating a sweeping vista of poetic vision and beauty.
—Lisa Chávez
In his remarkable first collection, Juan Morales dons with great enthusiasm and versatility the cloak of the muralist, fittingly painting history into myth, news into legend. Amid these stories of witches, superstitions, earthquakes, war, jokes, and ghosts, Morales makes good on his word to push "the doors of heaven open," constructing a kind of musical simultaneity that unites the world of past, of present, of prophetic. Whatever magic we readers encounter in Friday and the Year that Followed is real, if only that it awakens us to a nearly ungraspable truth: our miraculous is-ness.
—David Keplinger
Juan J. Morales writes: “It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story,” which is another way of saying, “It took a thousand journeys to get to mine.” As an artist with Ecuadorian and Puerto Rican bloodlines engaged with the Spanish colonial histories of South America and the Caribbean, Morales explores the legacies of language and landscape, mapping out an expansive poetic portrait of his ancestral homeland. The Siren World is a glorious testimony to the will of the Americas to reconfigure and preserve its cultural identities, which are still thriving and palpable in the heartbeats and “reconstruction songs” of its native children, its travelers, its bordercrossers, and its poets.
—Rigoberto González
In The Siren World, Juan J. Morales explores the complexities of identity with grace and humor, passion and irony, arcing across centuries through lessons never learned, voices never heard. Caught between multiple worlds, multiple identities both mistaken and claimed, he offers a unique perspective that challenges many of our assumptions as readers. He may be someone “who speaks the native tongue” he’s “never learned,” but he is fluent in the language of poetry. History does indeed come alive in these poems that remind us that we are still living it, and reliving it, moving back, forward, then back again, no matter who we are—and, as Morales reminds us, we’re all still trying to figure that out too.
—Jim Daniels
The word "cleave" has two seemingly paradoxical meanings: to divide, and to join. In The Siren World, Juan Morales defines a series of distances--from Ecuador to Puerto Rico, from mother to father, from the historical pain of a smallpox victim to the "failed double-kick flip, ankle's loud pop" of a skateboarding accident. On one page, Pizarro and his generals sort the "wreckage of job well done," and on the next we confront "The Cursing Chorus of the Mob." But these poems are about bridges, not canyons; they do not gape, they reach. They sing, and they code switch, as in "Passport": "When I turned 18, my father gave me a machete. When I turned 21, my father gave me a shoe shine kit." Morales showcases his striking dexterity of craft, toggling between prose poetry and sonnets, and a genuine search for truth no matter how painful. Yet there is pleasure here too, in the euphoria of the moment "When ancestral light circles you and seizes your pen." I am grateful for this voice, and for this brave and bracing collection.
—Sandra Beasley
“Always he [the speaker in the poems] approaches the chaos that is his life with an abiding sense of humor and resourcefulness.”—Strange Horizons
“These words are words we’ve always had inside but never been able to say, and this house coming together in these pages, we can live in it for a while.”—Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels: A Novel
“These poems are filled with energy and velocity and are at once intimate and grand. Smart, sharp, and intimate, Morales is a truly gifted writer.”—Kevin Prufer, author of How He Loved Them
“These poems are imbued with the work of trying to understand the histories of broken things like unions, selves, homes, pasts. They carry strategies for survival even as they document crisis and loss.”—Aracelis Girmay, author of Kingdom Animalia: Poems
