Swan Scythe Press

Ce_Uno_One
This title is out of print.
These bilingual (even trilingual!) poems, by a highly honored Chicano poet and children's author, celebrate our unity as human beings and announce the coming of the New Sun—which the Maya believe arrives in 2012— and Alarcón identifies as the era of the “Flower Sun” when the World's biggest concerns would be “the colors / and the scents / of flowers // sprouting / from nowhere/ everywhere…”

Ce Uno One

By Francisco X. Alarcón

ISBN: 978-1-930454-27-9

Read an excerpt: “Somos Uno, We Are One

Praise for Ce Uno One

Uno is a miraculous achievement - part prophecy of and for a new spiritual revolution, part ritual word-practice for the actual coming together of elements, bodies, nations and universal forces and part love song for the dead, for the living and those in emergence. Alarcón, furthers and grounds the work of the urban shaman poet and of the project of Latin@ Indigenous poetics during the last forty years - a task few, if any, have accomplished. A daring, rare, gifted, and radical power lies in these pages. Do not be lulled by the lyrical and incantatory music; examine this closely; here is a blue-print for the new poet, the awakened social actor in a time of global crises.-- Juan Felipe Herrera, winner of the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award

Minimalist, joyful, and essential, Alarcón's multilingual poem-songs are strong vessels for anyone who is willing to journey through the soul's deep yet limpid cenotes sagrados, and emerge radiant, with a new voice in harmony with a multitude of world cantos. A treat to the eyes and ears and as vital as earth, water, air and fire. Bravo!! -- Lucha Corpi, author of Palabras de Mediodía/Noon Words

Alarcón composes activist music. The lyrics are spare but bursting. Though they don't feel tense, they stretch with tension to pull us from aloneness to oneness, to string all life together with radio waves. He is a poet who loves harmony and unity above anything lesser. And like the openness of paper, he eases the writing of that world together. -- Sandra McPherson, poet/founder of Swan Scythe Press

About Francisco X. Alarcón

Francisco X. Alarcón (born in Los Angeles, in 1954, and raised in Guadalajara, Mexico) is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, and a number of books of bilingual poetry for children. He has won many awards and fellowships, including the Danforth and Fulbright fellowships, and the 1993 Carlos Pellicer-Robert Frost Poetry Honor Award, the 1993 American Book Award, the 1993 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and the 1984 Chicano Literary Prize. In April 2002 he received the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association (BABRA) in San Francisco. He teaches at the University of California, Davis. He is the founder of Facebook's popular page "Poets Against SB 1070."

A review by Nina Serrano from El Tecolote in English
A review by Nina Serrano from El Tecolote in Spanish

Contact Francisco X Alarcón: fjalarcon@ucdavis.edu>