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.<\/p>\n
With his newest collection, \u201cMy Mother, the Butcher,\u201d 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 \u2014 words that are sharper than a meat cleaver.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
If\u00a0Robledo\u2019s poetry dwells in the body \u2014 residing in flesh, memory and the intimate violence of family \u2014 then language remains central in CL “Rooster” Martinez’s\u00a0 “Mexican Dinosaur,”<\/a> a collection of poetry that turns outward, a voice that refuses confinement.<\/p>\n Where\u00a0Robledo approaches inwardly with surgical precision, Martinez projects \u2014 loud, persistent and unflinching \u2014 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 \u201ctwice as hard\u201d and the uneasy inheritance of culture under pressure.<\/p>\n