THE MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW
MBR BOOKWATCH/TAYLOR’S BOOKSHELF

Our Nuyorican Thing
Volume 18, Number 3, March 2019

Synopsis: In Our Nuyorican Thing: The Birth of A Self-Made Identity, poet, writer and activist Samuel Diaz Carrion explores what being ‘Nuyorican’ is and what it means.

What started out as blog correspondence for the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s website (2001-2004), quickly turned into a cultural exchange about the Cafe and Puerto Rican culture. Our Nuyorican Thing is a compendium of those blog entries and emails that also includes Diaz Carrion’s poetry seen through the eyes of a “Puerto Rican Indiana Jones” who has quietly studied “the trade route of a new language — collecting poetry and stories as the artifacts of the day.”

Critique: An inherently riveting, thought-provokingly informative, and an inherently delightful read that will satisfy any reader with an appetite for cross-cultural discussions, Our Nuyorican Thing: The Birth of A Self-Made Identity is an extraordinary, original, entertaining, and occasionally iconoclastic volume that will linger in the mind and memory long after the book itself has been finished and set back upon the shelf. While very highly recommended for both community and academic library collections, it should be noted for personal reading lists that Our Nuyorican Thing is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $6.99)