This newest collection from Richard Vargas stands chest-to-chest with the realities of the American working class. At once acerbic and tender, the poems swell with curiosity and compassion for the people living in a culture designed to milk them dry. Vargas writes with humor, with wonder, with wickedness and guileless admiration, acknowledging those whose lives are seldom glamorized.

Richard Vargas was born in Compton, California. He edited and published five issues of The Tequila Review from 1978 to 1980, publishing early works by Jimmy Santiago Baca, Alberto Rios, Nila Northsun, Dennis Cooper, Ron Koertge, and many more. His first book, McLife, was featured twice on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. A second book, American Jesus, was published by Tia Chucha Press in 2007. His third book, Guernica, revisited, was published in 2014 by Press 53 and was featured once more on The Writer's Almanac. How A Civilization Begins was published by Mouthfeel Press in 2022. He received the 2011 Taos Summer Writers' Conference's Hispanic Writer Award, was on the faculty of the 2012 10th National Latino Writers Conference, and facilitated a workshop at the 2015 Taos Summer Writers' Conference. Vargas edited and published The Más Tequila Review from 2009 to 2015, featuring poets from across the country. He has read his poetry to audiences from Los Angeles to Indianapolis and many locales in between. Currently, he resides in Wisconsin, near the lake where Otis Redding's plane crashed.