This month, Alamo Colleges, particularly Palo Alto College, is celebrating three faculty poets whose first collections demonstrate their love of poetry, dedication to literature as a teaching discipline, and versatility in teaching and publishing.
With his newest collection, “My Mother, the Butcher,” Gerard Robledo, an assistant professor of English, offers readers a raw and honest portrayal of masculinity, inheritance and shame through the central metaphors of flesh and butchery — words that are sharper than a meat cleaver.
This work portrays the male body not as heroic and idealized but as something that can be examined, handled and judged. This book rejects abstraction and highlights that identity can be experienced through the body, memory and inherited language.
If Robledo’s poetry dwells in the body — residing in flesh, memory and the intimate violence of family — then language remains central in CL “Rooster” Martinez’s “Mexican Dinosaur,” a collection of poetry that turns outward, a voice that refuses confinement.
Where Robledo approaches inwardly with surgical precision, Martinez projects — loud, persistent and unflinching — into the public sphere. He shows how caricature and stereotype can cause long-lasting harm. The Chicano experience here is not abstract; it is lived through exhaustion, labor, the strain of proving oneself “twice as hard” and the uneasy inheritance of culture under pressure.
Robledo and Martinez represent points on a broad spectrum of contemporary American poetry — one focused on interiority and the other on performative assertion. This contrast becomes especially meaningful when paired with Valerie Paige’s “Identity Theft,” another debut collection that explores the gendered aspects of identity formation and rupture.
Paige (a pseudonym) also teaches English literature at Palo Alto College. Her work explores the psychic and cultural pressures placed on women — tracing a path from the inherited stories of “once upon a time” to the oppressive domestic scripts of “playing house,” from the quiet despair of “empty wombs and crowded rooms” to the fiery transformation of “The dollhouse arsonist.”
Her poems explore fractured spaces — “shattered mirrors and hidden chambers,” “voices in the attic” — where the self is shaped and haunted until, finally, a figure rises “out of the ashes”: a woman remade through fire, loss and self-reclamation, not restored to innocence.
Together, these three poets explore the broader poetics of identity under pressure — where the body, the voice and the psyche become sites of challenge and renewal — and also find that poetic voices can liberate and celebrate everyday life.
Rafael C. Castillo teaches writing and humanities at Palo Alto College.