Pedro Pietri: Selected Poetry

In this charming and powerful posthumous volume, Pietri (1944–2004), a co-founder of New York City’s legendary Nuyorican Poets Café, shows off the sharp, surreal sense of humor he employs in writing on the social and political issues affecting New York City’s Puerto Rican community. Pietri’s use of short lines, rhyme, and repetition give his poetry a song-like quality as he engages and critiques pop culture and politics, among other subjects. He demonstrates his poetic range in such poems as “Driving Without a Car,” a striking elegy for a friend in which he mixes Spanish and English, and the confessional and the surreal, in lines that capture the challenges faced by young Nuyoricans. In contrast, Pietri’s series of poems titled “Telephone Booth” reveals his gift for blue humor: “cemeteries to the right/ cemeteries to the left,” he writes, “its impossible to get a hardon / when you are in long island.” On rare occasions, some poems feel less complete in their execution, whether due to an underdeveloped persona or an overdone rhyme, but the majority offer abundant joy and imagination that may inspire the reader to pick up a pen: “the magic of/ writing poetry,” Pietri declares, “is not knowing/ how to do it/ right or wrong!” [em](Aug.) [/em]