Slow Lightning

“[Corral] seamlessly blends English and Spanish in Slow Lightning.”—Craig Morgan Teicher, Publishers Weekly

“Corral is a writer that cares both for the poetic line, but also for the bodies that he writes about, for family, legacy, culture, and what it means to be American. I go to this book again and again, and to me, it’s a masterpiece.”—Ocean Vuong, NPR Morning Edition

“He mixes colloquial Spanish and English, and he packs many, many lines with sharp, sensual, specific imagery—this is Technicolor poetry. . . . Very engaging.”—Ray Olson, Booklist

“A classic in the making.”—Rigoberto González, El Paso Times

“By any standard, Slow Lightning is an impressive debut, a gathering of powerful and often defiant poems that are paradoxically realized through formal control.”—Lambda Literary Review

Winner of the 2011 Whiting Writers Award, as given by the Whiting Foundation

Finalist for the 2012 Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry

Honorable Mention, Poetry category at the 2013 New York Book Festival sponsored by JM Northern Media LLC

“[W]e can make of what would blind us a conduit for changed vision, suggests Corral. In these poems, a cage implies all the rest that lies outside it; any frame frames a window through which to see other possibilities unfolding. . . . Like Hayden, Corral resists reductivism. Gay, Chicano, ‘Illegal-American,’ that’s all just language, and part of Corral’s point is that language, like sex, is fluid and dangerous and thrilling, now a cage, now a window out. In Corral’s refusal to think in reductive terms lies his great authority. His refusal to entirely trust authority wins my trust as a reader.”—Carl Phillips, from the Foreword