There is always a destination, by Miami-based painter John Sanchez.
In Handling Destiny, his third book of poems, Adrian Castro examines the Yoruba idea that the course of a life is pre-determined, and only through faith is one able to fulfill it.
"One's destiny is completely personal,'' Castro says from his yellow-painted bungalow in Shenandoah, where he grows the backyard sage and star apple he uses in his practice as an Ifa priest and, also, in his poems.
"In the dream I would wash this stone with herbs. . . ., " he writes in a a title poem that travels between the geographies of mountain and shore as it considers the divine act of writing. "Now I'd have to memorize these marks / make words then articulate them. . . . ''
For two decades the Cuban-Dominican Castro has forged a distinct lexicon in poems that meld Caribbean and West African cultures. Shango, the Yoruban deity of thunder and fire, is as likely to flash across his stanzas as is a bright calabash or a bundle of sugar cane.
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Read mini reviews of poetry books by Adrian Castro, Francisco Aragon, Brenda Cardenas, Suzanne Frischkorn, and John Murillo here.