Willie Perdomo, Author

Willie Perdomo is the author of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (Norton, 1996) and Postcards of El Barrio (Isla Negra Press, 2002). His work has been included in several anthologies including Metropolis Found (Crown Books, 2003), The Harlem Reader (Three Rivers Press, 2003), Poems of New York (Everyman’s Library/Knopf, 2002), Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (Three Rivers Press, 2002). His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Bomb, Russell Simmons’ One World Magazine and Pen America: A Journal for Writers and Readers. He is the author of a Visiting Langston, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book for Children, illustrated by Bryan Collier (Henry Holt/Books for Young Readers, 2002) and has been featured on several PBS documentaries including Words in Your Face and The United States of Poetry as well as HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and BET’s Hughes’ Dream Harlem.


Perdomo was the recipient of a NYFA Poetry Fellowship 2001. Recently, he has published short stories in the anthologies Wachale!: Growing up Latino in the USA (Cricket Books, 2002) and Brown Sugar 2: A Collection of Erotic Black Fiction (Washington Square Press, 2002). Perdomo has taught workshops for the Cave Canem Foundation, Bronx Writer’s Center and the Friends Seminary School. He is currently working on his next book, Emergency Money.
From powerful poetry to Spanglish lexicon “Smoking Lovely,” by Willie Perdomo’s (Rattapallax Press, $12) latest book, “Smoking Lovely,” makes Latin Manhattan’s neighborhoods sparkle like a Fourth of July night sky. With muscular language that’s funny and surreal, Perdomo explores love and struggle. He makes readers stop uptown and visit the forgotten – like the character Kriptonite, a thug to some, but in Perdomo’s poem, a man who has been in love and in trouble. A Nuyorican Pablo Neruda, Perdomo finds a love poem’s pulse and takes it. From “French Roast’s” syncopated sensuality to “Seesaw’s” hard knocks -”I go up in smoke and come down in a nod”- Perdomo makes a connection between getting high and getting hurt. Perdomo uses the tragic and talented lives of salsa soneros Hector Lavoe and La Lupe as cautionary tales. Like the legendary salsa singer Lavoe, Perdomo possesses gifts and demons. In “The Day Hector Lavoe Died,” Perdomo’s piercing images conjure and transcend his hardships: “I do backstrokes in the drip coming down my throat.” Throughout the collection of 31 poems (accompanied by a CD), love is the common denominator. Like the jibaro singers, Perdomo’s got love for los niños, the Amadou Diallos of the world and, ultimately, “la gente.” So much love, you can hear the Fania-All Stars playing “Mi Gente” between “Smoking’s” pages. – David Mills


“Smoking Lovely, Willie Perdomo’s second volume of poetry, confirms his hard won place in American letters. Addiction, poverty, class and racial identity, love and recovery are examined with a devastating and streetwise voice, marked with irrefutable artistic integrity and craftsmanship. These poems sing, howl, and heal with a sad and searing wisdom akin to genius. Smoking Lovely is destined to become not just one of the best books of the year but of the decade.” — Sapphire, author of Push and Black Wings & Blind Angels
“Willie Perdomo is an electric poet. His poems crackle with energy. The poet knows his beloved barrio, what to celebrate and what to condemn. He also has the courage to confront his own demons. There is raw pain in this voice, and much more: humor, irony, music, intelligence.” –Martin Espada, author of City of Coughing and Dead Radiators and Alabanza


“This book like all good volumes of poetry is an articulation of the poet’s and the poem’s sense of belonging. These poems belong in this book.” — Paul Beatty, author of Joker, Joker, Duece and The White Boy Shuffle.


“Willie Perdomo introduces crack to poetry with the genuine craftiness of the gentleman who presents his ex-lover to his wife. What’s said carries as much weight as what isn’t. Each stanza looks you squarely in the eyes and holds the stare a moment longer until it is pressed into your mind that rock bottom is no different than sky high.” — Saul Williams, author of She and award-winning actor in Slam


“Whether we’re talking Puerto Rico or the US, the Poetry Society of America or the corner of 123rd Street and Lexington Avenue, there is no poet alive who can match the lyrical intelligence, ferocious wit and searching humanity of Willie Perdomo. Perdomo is the hurricane we all write home about. He is to the word what lightning is to the sky. He is Langston and Hector (Lavoe) and Whitman and Mír. He is the heart in struggle with itself. Perdomo writes damnation as though it were heaven and breaks the ordinary — a mother calling her children home, a weed-trip to Brixton, heartbreak — into gold. He’s the Puerto Rican diaspora’s unofficial poet laureate and what he knows about being of color, being between languages, being poor, being a man, being in trouble, could save your life.” — Junot Díaz, author of Drown


Like a dose of Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries, and a Billie Holiday song with a Miguel Pinero chaser, Willie Perdomo’s long awaited follow-up to his powerful debut is a sizzling cocktail of drug addiction, love, recovery, and truth. The familiar Lexington Avenue of East Harlem continues to be his Yoknapatawpha but the world has become his lab in this collection of serious prose and gunfire verse. These poems find room to depict the change in urban scenery, the de-romanticization of withdrawal, a homeless man’s spin on empowerment zones, the global humor of a drug run and the reflective clarity of a train ride. As the poet declares in “Lexington Avenue Prelude,” “This is the face-to-face appointment with the Department of Human Resources/That you can’t miss even if you tried.”

Additional Praise for Willie Perdomo:

“Perdomo isn’t talking about the self-imposed exile of an artist but a whole community that’s been disfranchised against it’s will. His tie to that community is intergenerational, and he can move from the street talk of his peers to old-fashioned Latin lyrical faster than Celia Cruz can turn on her stilettos.” — The Nation

Reviews for WHERE A NICKEL COSTS A DIME:

“Drawing on rap, jazz, Langston Hughes and the rhythms of the streets, this collection bristles with congas, timbales, police sirens and wino oracles. In poems that are scalding, toxic and dizzying, Perdomo reminds us that there is something wrong when feeling joy suggests mangled sanity.” — Publishers Weekly


“Many critics have lauded him as the next Langston Hughes and with a remarkable first collection of poetry entitled Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, Willie Perdomo may have little or no trouble living up to that expectation.” — The Source


“The already rich and diverse canon of Latino literature now includes a fresh young voice who uses Spanish Harlem as the setting and inspiration for many of his poems. Drawing from a hybrid Latino identity that embraces traditions from rice and beans to Langston Hughes Perdomo’s latest poems establish him as one of the most important Nuyorican voices of his generation.” Ed Morales, Latina Magazine

Praise for WHERE A NICKEL COSTS A DIME:

“Where a Nickel Costs a Dime is all about time. Where one learns that the cruelest prison of all is the prison of the mind. Willie has risen above to express the clarity of truth of what life is all about in Los Barrios. Punto!” — Piri Thomas, author of Down These Mean Streets


“Langston Hughes has been reincarnated and lives in Spanish Harlem. His name is Willie Perdomo. Where a Nickel Costs a Dime is a priceless, precious package of poetry.” — Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promise Land
“As you will see, Willie Perdomo is a new and important voice, a Djali (Griot), and here he is right on the gig. Like they say, Djeli Djeli Djeli Ya (gettin down) and rising up!”– Amiri Baraka


“In the words of Muhammad Ali Willie Perdomo’s poems ‘float like butterflies, sting like bees.’ They have grace and power and don’t waste their time, but zoom down the subway tracks to the true heart of New York City, Harlem, which is brown and black, and talks back in its dialect of drugs, death, and destiny.”– Ai, National Book Award-winning author of Vice

Tags: Crown Books, Three Rivers Press, Willie Perdomo