Annual Tabet Poetry Reading

The Fever of Being is a series of poems, some written entirely or partly in Spanish, ranging in mood from comic to tragic and dealing with Urrea's life within the Hispanic-Anglo border culture.

Luis Urrea confronts head-on the ghosts and contradictions of his being -- his father, a dark and crazy macho Mexicano who Luis admired and dreaded as a young boy; his proud and lonely Anglo mother, so out of place in the heat of Tijuana; and the conflict of cultures and languages in his psyche. Ghost Sickness drives into that confusion with the same kind of intensity that goaded Luis' father when he drove his 1966 Rambler into the Sonoran desert on his fatal journey.

From the author of Pulitzer-nominated The Devil's Highway and national bestseller The Hummingbird's Daughter comes an exquisitely composed collection of poetry on life at the border. Weaving English and Spanish languages as fluidly as he blends cultures of the southwest, Luis Urrea offers a tour of Tijuana, spanning from Skid Row, to the suburbs of East Los Angeles, to the stunning yet deadly Mojave Desert, to Mexico and the border fence itself. Mixing lyricism and colloquial voices, mysticism and the daily grind, Urrea explores duality and the concept of blurring borders in a melting pot society.