“Historical accounts through Mares’s poetic visions present the poet, intellectual, and resolanero through a critical public dialogue, in a manner that evokes the conversations he overheard his parents having about the Spanish Civil War in his childhood home near La Plaza Vieja, Albuquerque’s Old Town neighborhood. Mares draws the readers/eavesdroppers out of the corners and engages us to create our own musings and reminds us of the important role that poetry plays in keeping historical memory alive. The poems, illuminated by the twin flames of English and Spanish, present the same perspective but from a different angle. Or, as his camarada Tomás Atencio would say, ‘Es el mismo guante, nomás que alrevez’ (It is the same glove, inside out).”—Levi Romero, Inaugural New Mexico State Poet Laureate and author of A Poetry of Remembrance: New and Rejected Works
