Furious Dusk

Rhina P. Espaillat, judge of the 2014 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, describes Furious Dusk, David Camposs winning collection, as a work whose five parts trace a sons effortsonly partially successfulto fulfill his fathers expectations andperhaps even more difficultunderstand those expectations enough to forgive them. The poet's reflections are catalyzed by learning of his fathers impending death, which, in turn, forces him to examine his fathers expectations against his own evolving concept of what it means to be a man.

The poems' speaker sifts through his past to find the speckles of memory that highlight the pressures to fit the mold of masculinity forged both by the Mexican culture of his father and the American culture he inhabits. The problematic norms of both rip the speaker in two directions as he recounts his fathers severe parenting, as he explores the inability to father a child, as he witnesses human suffering, as he overeats and confronts the effects on his body, and, finally, as he realizes what it means to transcend these expectations. The speakers epiphany frees him to reject masculine stereotypes and allows him to see himself simply as a human being. That realization, in turn, enables the speaker to see his father not only as father, husband, and man, but as a citizen of Earth.

Through Camposs bold imagery and accessible language and themes, he memorably adds to the continuing conversation of the effects of cultural expectations on the children of immigrant parents.