My Father Was a Toltec

Ana Castillo has a deserved reputation as one of the country's most powerful and entrancing novelists, but she began her literary career as a poet of passion and uncompromising commitment. This collection brings back into print the best of her early work, including selected poems from The Invitation and Women Are Not Roses and the entire text of her landmark 1988 collection, My Father Was a Toltec.

Whether invoking her origins as the daughter of a street warrior, a member of the Toltec gang in Chicago, or defining her own lyrical positions on a variety of social, political, sexual, and aesthetic issues, Castillo's poetic voice is unmistakably her own—and will be immediately recognizable to the lovers of her fiction.

“Ana Castillo's use of Spanish, Chicago street lingo, and English in My Father Was a Toltec is exciting and—forerunners notwithstanding—absolutely new.” —Margaret Randall, Women's Review of Books

“Ana Castillo is immensely insightful in every sense of the word. Her work—anything and everything written by her, poems, stories, novels—must be read if one is to gain understanding of the vast landscape of the soul.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estes