Praise for Autobiography of So-and-so: Poems in Prose
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"Over the course of 46 prose pieces centering on the speaker's life lived alternately in Colombia and the United States, Guevara works up a self-portrait in which each tale builds off the previous to make an accumulative, unflinching music. The 'so-and-so' who emerges in this third full-length collection is a figure who straddles a fence between Latino and American identity, between childhood and adulthood, between First-World amenities and developing-world poverty: 'We're stopped on the road from Belencito to Bogota. In the convex sphere of an owl I see my six-month-old body cramping and weak in my mother's arms. My brothers are asleep next to us in the back seat. It's April, the rainy season.' Rather than attempting to reconcile the contradictions of the beautiful and grotesque, Guevara allows soot, mud and blood to exist beside 'almonds of gold,' 'that copper synapse' and 'my father's box of books' so that the reader is all the more aware of the indivisible pleasures of the visual world. Surreal realpolitik ('In Quito, he becomes the head of the opposition party because the poor are in love with his long, beautiful hands') infiltrates religious, sexual and familial relations, and economic reflections drive the indelible imagery. As in Postmortem and Poems of the River Spirit, Guevara's attention to organic cycles of growth and decay infuses the poems with a tenebrous resonance that always comes ineffably back to earth: 'The moon, a corroding disk, streaks down on a filthy miner, sitting, a masked coon at his feet.'"

–Publisher's Weekly

"Maurice Kilwein Guevara ... gives us a book that is part memoir, part poetry collection and part surrealistic vision of what it is to have one foot in North America and one in South. ...As the voice of a man caught between cultures, this is a quintessentially American book. ...To be American, Guevara implies, is to live here but to be connected elsewhere."

–Michael Simms, Pittsurgh Post-Gazette

"The playful title establishes the tone Guevara maintains almost throughout, as the author takes autobiographical material and imaginatively recasts it into something of nearly mythical proportions, as Marquez so often does with his characters. Perhaps because American poets tend to mine their pasts so grimly and journalistically, Guevara’s work startles the reader with it joyful, fun house distortions. ...While rooted in Latin American surrealism, Guevara concocts a language and a world that is all his own."

–John Bradley, Rain Taxi

Praise for Postmortem
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"This is a book that pulls its readers in and holds them in the thrall of its emotions. Sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes horrifying, sometimes heartwarming, these poems run the gamut of the author's lifestory. At the end, the book does, as its final words ask, echo."

–Hispanic Review

Praise for Poems of the River Spirit
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"[Kilwein] Guevara writes with immense poise and authority. His images are exact and true, his language is raw yet utterly polished. Furthermore, the word 'multicultural' might have been coined for this poet, who alludes to Dante as casually as he deploys Spanish slang. Voices haunt this book. . ."

–Booklist