In this, his fifth collection of poetry, Ray Gonzalez takes the reader to the heart of the Chicano and American Southwest experience. His is the voice of desert flowers, hardscrabble border cities, scorpions, snakes, adobes, petroglyophs, arroyos and mesas. The poems tell the stories of native peoples, invading Westerners, and the Chicano fathers and gradfathers who have long been silent.