Manuel Paul Lopez

These Days of Candy Manuel Paul Lopez

Poetry. Fiction. Hybrid Genre. Latinx Studies. THESE DAYS OF CANDY is a collection of mixed- genre work, including verse play, micro fiction, serial and solo poem, ekphrastic, and poem cycle riffing on the YouTube tutorial phenomenon. This collection utilizes tropes that point to fable and fairy tale, while releasing faint notes of surrealism, Dada-caca, Raskal Chicanx Poetiks, big-hearted lyric, fronterismo, collage, and elliptical dream messaging, among other gadgets derived from the deliriously ambulatory interior vita. Thematically, these works explore and respond to state-sanctioned surveillance, hyper- policing of person/hood, neighbor/hood and global/hood, atmospheric violence in its various iterations, loss and love, and the slow asphyxiation of ego addiction. In these pages, readers are introduced to characters, like Lulu, the superstar crossing guard angel, a Muppet-like addict, an eccentric stenographer dictating cosmic courtroom dramas, a band of fireflies responding to metaphysical help-hollers, military operatives renouncing war with love and art, and an immigrant child battling the exteriorly-induced attacks of otherness and distance.