Heresies

Orlando Ricardo Menes is the author of three other books of poetry, including Fetish: Poems. His work has appeared in the Harvard Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ploughshares, West Branch, Callaloo, and elsewhere.

A scholar, a painter, an El Greco of boundless darkness and light, a Caliban coming back to laugh and sing. A tour de force. This is an incredible accomplishment--luscious, jeweled, intoxicating, fragrant as copal and sharp as obsidian.--Juan Felipe Herrera, poet laureate of California Heresies hordes detail, combining fact and fiction, and lets symbols accumulate as they do in a culture. It weaves bodily and religious imagery, arousing readers to examine their own beliefs. . . . An intense and masterful undertaking that requires careful dissection.--Prairie Schooner Heresies is a rich, satisfying collection imbued with wit, compassion, and a respectful skepticism for multicultural religious devotion and all its complexities.--Daniel A. Olivas, El Paso Times Brutally irreverent, reverently made, at once polyphonic and singular in its scope, Heresies is a work of fearless, sublimely syncretic imagination.--Daniel Tobin, author of Belated Heavens