RaveThe Kenyon ReviewElliptically narrative, imagistic, musical, and fabular, the poems in Corral’s debut poetry collection, Slow Lightning, explore the shadowy borderlands of both gay and Chicano identity while adapting and altering aspects of magical realism ... When describing the manner in which Corral’s imagination defies verisimilitude, one’s tempted to conjure the striking amalgamations of the marvelous and mundane in the unrealities of Borges or García Márquez. Corral, however, subverts even as he honors his folksy incarnations of magical realism by confronting the political realities sometimes absent in the genre. His poems consistently reveal the nightmarish subjugation and manifold experiences of illegal refugees within his most enigmatic fantasias ... Corral’s fantastical transformations often seem realistic depictions of desire. The self, he also suggests, is always engaged in the process of transition.
