Introduction By

Hugh Fox

Document Type

Book

Publication Date

1979

Abstract

“An adept mixture of fact, history, surrealism, and mysticism,” says Hugh Fox in his introduction to Over DeSoto’s Bones, published in 1979. The entire collection is an intelligent, ironic, and engaging look at history and its consequences in the desert west. Beasley draws together both arid landscape and cultural tradition, finding union between disparate forces on the page. “Anza Conquers the Desert” is a witty, wry seventeen-poem sequence mixing magic and history, and detailing the 1774 expedition of Captain Juan Bautista de Anza and his men traveling from San Xavier del Bac near Tucson into the Colorado desert. “Zoot Suit War” is a precise and questioning account of racial confrontation that took place in Los Angeles during the Second World War.

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