Cuentos cruentos. (Cruel Tales)

Traditional and pop culture characters get together to amuse the readers in these prose poems, which use rime, metric, and a masterly grasp of the Spanish children's tales lexicon to create a cruel and satirical portrait of contemporary living anxieties. Peter Punk is the aging rebel whose anarchist ideology gets in the way of his settled friends; Van Dog is an animal with a sensitive spirit that creates artful and miscomprehended pieces with its feces; the genie in the bottle is an alcoholic parent described by his child. The tales come to life with the help of funny illustrations and a good dose of doodling. The dark humor and colloquial uses of Iberian Spanish can be challenging, but the intrepid and entertaining questioning of the morals our society portrays in children stories makes it worth reading. Recommended for public libraries with a contemporary poetry and contemporary Spanish literature collection.—Angela Lang, New York