Work
Soto's poetry focuses on daily experiences, often reflecting on his life as a Chicano. Regarding his relationship with the Mexican-American community, Soto commented "as a writer, my duty is not to make people perfect, particularly Mexican Americans. I’m not a cheerleader. I’m one who provides portraits of people in the rush of life."
Soto writes novels, plays and memoirs, and has edited several literary anthologies. His story "The No-Guitar Blues" was made into a film, and he produced another film based on his book "The Pool Party." He is a prolific writer of children's books.
About his work Joyce Carol Oates noted "Gary Soto's poems are fast, funny, heartening, and achingly believable, like Polaroid love letters, or snatches of music heard out of a passing car; patches of beauty like patches of sunlight; the very pulse of a life."
Read more about this topic: Gary Soto
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Ours is the old, old story of every uprising race or class or order. The work of elevation must be wrought by ourselves or not at all.”
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“The real risks for any artist are taken ... in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it—when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.”
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