De Amor Oscuro / Of Dark Love

Santa Cruz, CA: Moving Parts Press, 1991. Rice, Ray. Quarto. (44)pp. One of 70 copies, signed by the author, Francisco X. Alarcón. Forty pen-and-ink drawings by Ray Rice, in his second collaboration with his daughter, Felicia Rice, printer and proprietor of Moving Parts Press, are at once abstract, fractural, and familiar. Literally and emotionally, they underscore Alarcón's fourteen homoerotic sonnets, which are reminiscent of those produced by Federico García Lorca in his suppressed collection, "Sonnets of Dark Love." Like Lorca, Alarcón reimagines the sonnet form to explore earthly loves and to bear out the emotion, turmoil, and beauty of queer desire, especially stark and beautiful against the typical machismo expected of men. Alarcón's verses are presented bilingually, with translations by poet Adrienne Rich and Francisco Aragon, a Lorca translator and scholar. In 1992, AIGA selected this edition as one of the fifty best designed books in the United States. Felicia Rice's Press has published hundreds of books, broadsides, prints, and ephemera celebrating the book as a performance of text; for the past 25 years, Rice has grounded this vision in the Literatura Chicanx/Latinx Series, which brings together Chicanx/Latinx artists and writers to explore the realities of their cultural experience. Bound in full yellow cloth with one of Ray Rice's illustrations printed on the front cover. Fine in a matching slipcase.