Human Nature

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Gary Soto's eleventh book of poems for adults, HUMAN NATURE is full of arresting images and surprising scenarios—and probably more uncanny opening lines than in any book you'll read all year. These poems pretend to be "simple" portraits of remembered youth and of life at the other end, where a man is walking into old age. Yet their surface transparency gives way to burrowing (often troubling) insights. Over and over he finds arresting, surprising cause for pau...