Selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the best poetry books published in 2012.

When I finished [Slow Lightning] I bawled. Wise and immense.

—Junot Diaz, The New York Times Book Review

He mixes colloquial Spanish and English, and he packs many, many lines with sharp, sensual, specific imagery—this is Technicolor poetry. . . . Very engaging.

—Ray Olson, Booklist

[W]e can make of what would blind us a conduit for changed vision, suggests Corral. In these poems, a cage implies all the rest that lies outside it; any frame frames a window through which to see other possibilities unfolding…

Like [Robert] Hayden, Corral resists reductivism. Gay, Chicano, 'Illegal-American,' that's all just language, and part of Corral's point is that language, like sex, is fluid and dangerous and thrilling, now a cage, now a window out. In Corral's refusal to think in reductive terms lies his great authority. His refusal to entirely trust authority wins my trust as a reader.

—Carl Phillips, from the Foreword

This debut does many things: there are melancholy poems about love between men in the age of HIV, sonnets in strict and forceful rhyme, poems addressed to paintings and art installations, poems that mix English and Spanish, elegies and protests, and difficult family memories. [more]

Publishers Weekly

Elliptically 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. [more]

Kenyon Review Online

The breaking of multiple taboos -- humanizing a much-maligned population, inscribing homosexuality on the same page as class and ethnicity, and insisting on making as much room as possible for Spanish in an English-dominant text ("Agringado. Recién llegado. / Eyes the color of garrapatas. / Manos de trapo. / Cell phone strapped like a pistola / to his belt.") demonstrate a deliberate push-back to the current anti-immigrant, anti-bilingualism, and anti-gay political climate across the country, and particularly in Arizona, Corral's home state. Indeed, in times of distress, "Even music can bleed."

The sophistication of "Slow Lightning," however, is that its stunning imagery, its serious treatment of craft, as well as its homage to a Southwestern culture and landscape that predates its life as a U.S. territory, will endow the book with a timeless quality. This is indeed a classic in the making. [more]

El Paso Times