A 14-year-old boy sits in the darkness of the Holiday Theater watching a scene of anti-Mexican racism in a Rock Hudson/Elizabeth Taylor movie. This scene, this memory, is at the heart of SCENE FROM THE MOVIE GIANT, a remarkable book-length poem in five parts by Tino Villanueva. He excavates the meaning of this scene and, in doing so, grapples with urgent questions of cultural identity. Tino Villanueva's SCENE FROM THE MOVIE GIANT is winner of the American Book Award for Poetry.

"Villanueva seems to be the total integration of the English-speaking intellectual with the Spanish-speaking counterpart. Villanueva has given us an unusual approach to poetic biculturalism." --World Literature Today

"All poems declare one thing: my heart aches...Villanueva's exceptional poems are evidence of poetry's redemptive powers of forgiveness and the solace people achieve through the word." --Harvard Review

"...handsomely produced, well-edited, and efficiently distributed as Chicano literature...a(n) uncommonly powerful addition to American Literature..." --The Texas Observer

I bought this book to do a paper for a class. I had no idea that I was buying what would become one of my favorite poetry books, or that this name given to me by a teacher would become one of my favorite poets. I would suggest this collection to any poetry lover. The poems in this book range from humorous to happy to angry to sad. There is something for every feeling.