Mexican Dinosaur - by C L Rooster Martinez (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Mexican Dinosaur is a poetic offering from C.L. "Rooster" Martinez and Write About Now Publishing. The collection of poems is a metamodernist take on the changing economic demographics of his San Antonio barrio, the confusion and desire to flourish within a hyphenated American identity, and the force of gravity that the push and pull of culture from both sides of a Mexican/American ethnicity has. In 2020, C.L published two previous works-A Saint for Lost Things (Alabrava Press) and As it is in Heaven (Kissing Dynamite Press), and received the San Antonio Individual Artists Project Grant in 2021.

Review Quotes

Mexican Dinosaur invites you into a clandestine understanding of the Mexican-American experience. "They don't know that we've been gold." Mexican Dinosaur shoves you into a chair and hands you a plate full of tender morsels and gusto. Here, "Rooster" Martinez unapologetically builds out connections to contemporary ideas on Mejicanos; "we are born mid-stride - outrunning the clock, the hounds, the hours and overtime." This collection adds a bend and a breath into all things rasquache with dignity and light. Mexican Dinosaur cannot be ignored. This collection should be celebrated for reminding us that Mexican-Americans "don't act like anyone else's song." Punto. Final.

Lupe Mendez, 2022 Texas Poet Laureate

From its fire-tongued opening line to its melting-blacktop close, Mexican Dinosaur celebrates a new mythos-one where the collision of two worlds lets loose a god-voice, a "sacred language that survives any apocalypse." This collection shows us what it means to repurpose, reauthenticate, reclaim. These poems bear witness to a legacy we are compelled to both honor & create. They say: "forgetting is a prayer our hands do not know."

Junious 'Jay' Ward, 2023 Charlotte, NC Poet Laureate, 2019 Individual World Poetry Slam Champion

This is a Texas sized snake fist punching old folktales & inventing new ones. These poems are for the weirdos, the outsiders, the nerds who think they're cool & the cool kids who think they're nerds. It's a road map for people who find themselves in rock & hip hop lyrics & stand in the intersection of being Mexican, being Mexican-American, being from Texas & being from San Antonio, which are all similar & yet very different. Martinez will teach you old magic chants & choruses of A Tribe Called Quest, all the while driving down Highway 151 with his fist in the air like the last scene in your favorite movie.

Bonafide Rojas, Poet, Musician & Author of Notes On The Return

To The Island