The Lighthouse Tattoo

In his fourth full-length collection, Jose Hernandez Diaz explores the first-generation Mexican American experience in nuanced linear verse, avant-garde offerings, and deadpan absurdist prose poems. 

The Lighthouse Tattoo features plainspoken pieces that reveal the Latinx experience through the lens of a socially conscious contrarian in work that melds the quotidian and the profound. Also included, of course, are experimental prose poems in the signature style and voice that contributed to the meteoric rise of this unique artist. Invoking James Tate, Gabriel García Márquez, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Albert Camus, Marosa di Giorgio, and others, Hernandez Diaz cements his place in both the poetic and surrealist traditions. 

Even as it unravels mysteries and explores the strange—zebras in a zoo on the moon or English dragons on the Pacific Coast Highway—The Lighthouse Tattoo shines its light on the complex emotions of a seasoned Latinx poet. In this extraordinary volume, the titular tattoo itself becomes evidence of a trauma survived, an apt metaphor for the book as a whole. As one speaker says, “I’m trapped inside of this prose poem, but I don’t want to get out. It’s nice and cozy in here. I’m invincible.”