I’m currently working on my fourth book of poetry, and I like to believe that I have grown as a poet with each project--that I don’t keep writing the same poem, or inhabiting the same landscape. But when I compare the poems in the fourth book with the poems in my first, published over a decade ago, I recognize that I’m still comfortable writing about people, usually Mexicans, and about death. If my poetics celebrated a holiday it would be the Day of the Dead--with music and feasting. If my poems took three-dimensional shapes they would sit on a shelf like a row of sugar skulls--colorful and textured and slightly disconcerting, but appealing to all five senses. Even as a beginning poet I couldn’t forgive myself if a poem didn’t move to a rhythm--sound, like the use of internal rhyme, is extremely important to me--or if it didn’t invite the reader to touch or taste or smell, even if that interaction was unpleasant. I suppose I haven’t finish singing the song about violence and mortality, pain and loss, that I began four books ago. Writing about such subject matter is neither fetish or obsession, but a conversation that keeps getting more interesting with each exchange, that is, with each poem.