The Parachutist, Jose Hernandez Diaz

In The Parachutist, Jose Hernandez Diaz weaves a breathtaking tapestry of poetry that delves into the heart of the Chicano experience. Diaz’s poetic voice shines brightly, capturing the tension between inherited struggles and present-day privilege, translating the untold stories of his ancestors into vivid, surreal verses. This collection is a tribute to those who, due to circumstance, could not tell their stories, as if the speaker is furiously documenting the poetry they never had the chance to create.

Against the backdrop of Southern California and the mystical landscapes of Mexican mythology, Diaz’s poetry blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. His characters—whether skeletons, astronauts, or mariachi musicians—move through a world where the ordinary is imbued with magic. The speaker navigates landscapes filled with myth and memory, from the quiet fields of Mexico to bustling Los Angeles streets. At its core, The Parachutist is a testament to the enduring spirit of resilience. With its surrealism, cultural references, and deeply human insights, this collection invites readers to reconsider the boundaries of reality while exploring the intersections of imagination, culture, and personal history.

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What a wonderful and strange book! Hernandez Diaz wakes his characters again and again into a world of absurdist dream logic, in which these generally good-hearted folk—from the man in the Pink Floyd shirt to the guitar-playing skeleton—do their best to find a reasonable path through the day, or their life. It isn’t easy; one might have to struggle, for instance, with an overly bureaucratic centaur in hell. Or one might try to help a ravenous poet who refuses to eat anything but fugitive leaves. Wild and adventurous, and full of familial tenderness too, this collection entertained and moved me as it danced in and out of the titular parachutist’s “war against the mundane.” These poems are an absolute delight.

–Heather Christle

Jose Hernandez Diaz’s poems are radiant, blazing, intensely revelatory. Diaz’s command of the line is deeply masterful, his ability to probe history, family, culture, origins and the inner workings of the mind in flux is staggering in its flexibility and power. These poems sing, soar, singe, they know exactly how to “bend and bleed.” This is an astounding, magnificent collection.

–Jennifer Maritza McCauley, author of When Trying to Return Home

Jose Hernandez Diaz is fast becoming one of our premier prose poets. His prose poems radiate a lucidity that’s familiar and otherworldly. His bone-clean language spirals into the absurd, into the mythic, into narratives rich with surprises and swerves. His imagination is tremendous, electric. I’m also struck by the gratitude in these poems. Diaz centers and listens to his ancestors, which allows him to carry them with him as he embarks on a literary career that’s already garnering readers, accolades.

–Eduardo C. Corral