Luis J. Rodriguez

Biography

Luis J. Rodriguez is the author of more than fourteen books, including It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing (Touchstone, 2011), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. He is the poet laureate of Los Angeles and the founding editor of Tia Chucha Press.

See Work

POETRY / Summer 2015

Heavy Blue Veins: Watts, 1959

By Luis J. Rodriguez

Heavy blue veins streak across my mother’s legs,
Some of them bunched up into dark lumps at her ankles.

POETRY / Summer 2015

Fevered Shapes

By Luis J. Rodriguez

I wallowed in a needle-spawned world,
addicted to dope and the crazy life,
and yet there I was—in Berkeley
for my first poetry reading.