Borderless Butterflies / Mariposas sin fronteras

Borderless Butterflies: Earth Haikus and Other Poems / Mariposas sin fronteras: Haikus terrenales y otros poemas by Francisco X. Alarcón is a bi-lingual book of poems in Spanish and English for the earth and the people, crafted by a poet at the peak of his power. It speaks to the porousness of our boundaries, and the futility of all attempts to separate people and regions so intimately intertwined. Alarcón is a man who, like the monarch butterfly he eulogizes, lives in and migrates between many worlds. From Los Angeles to Guadalajara, from the Mission barrio in San Francisco to Stanford and UC Davis, he has lived fully immersed in the diverse cultural landscape of California and Mexico. Prevalent in Alarcón's works, as Francisco Aragón states in his insightful blurb, is "an indigenous spirituality that makes no distinction between animal (including humans), vegetable, and mineral." Without a doubt Francisco is inspired by his Mesoamerican heritage and poets like Nezahualcoyotl. He is inspired also by the Sufi mystic poet Rumi, the mystic poets of the Golden Age in Spain as well as by Federico García Lorca and more contemporary poets - revolutionary poet Roque Dalton of El Salvador and groundbreaking Chicana poet/essayist Gloria Anzaldúa. But the haiku, senryū, and tanka forms of the Japanese poetic tradition give shape to many of his "winged poems," the meta-poetic butterflies of this collection that come to Francisco so effortlessly.