Ariel Francisco is the author of All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017) and Before Snowfall, After Rain (Glass Poetry Press, 2016). Born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents, his poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2016, Fjords Review, Gulf Coast, PANK, Poets.org, Prelude, Quiet Lunch, Washington Square, and elsewhere. He lives in South Florida (for now).

Books by Ariel Francisco:

Other poems on the web by Ariel Francisco:
"Driving Past Lake Tohopekaliga"
Two poems
"Reading James Wright on the L Train"
"Rat in the Crawl Space"
"Pissing on the Lawn of a Foreclosed Home"
"Jellyfish Rain"
Two poems
Three poems
"Nighthawks of the 24-Hour Donut Shops"
"My Dad's Gun"

*Ariel Francisco's Website.

*Ariel Francisco on Twitter.

About All My Heroes Are Broke:

"Ariel Francisco is the quintessential poet's poet, by which I mean poetry is his constant, necessary companion. His speaker is always reading—Keats, Basho, Lorca, James Wright, Tu Fu, Emily Dickinson, Bukowski, and others—in bars and on subways, on balconies and at breakfast tables, in Miami and New York City. Francisco knows life is both preposterous and sublime, sometimes simultaneously, and his meditations will dazzle you. Perceptive, wise, and enduring, these poems will become necessary companions to all those who read All My Heroes Are Broke. I predict the very best of the next generation will write poems with titles like 'Reading Ariel Francisco on the Metromover.'"
—Denise Duhamel

"All My Heroes Are Broke is a collection of poems as pure and down-to-earth as a sack of gold nuggets. At the same time, it is a book that leaps—like Basho's frog—into the still pool of the image, casting marvelous rings across its surface. Ariel Francisco is a poet of witness and compassion, whose voice is a necessary tonic for these disheartening times."
—Campbell McGrath

"In a piece I kept returning to, the speaker attempts to detonate a long-lost cousin's memorable 'nasty temper' as a way to determine if, in fact, it's him by not leaving a tip: 'not a single dollar,/hoping he'll be so pissed off/he'll confront me.' Thus, the poem ends with a provocation as an act of love. All My Heroes Are Broke is, on the one hand, a vivid love-letter to the New York and Florida of one family's vital trajectory which, a couple of generations prior, launched from the Dominican Republic. And the other, it's a 'Portrait of the Poet as a Young Man' with brilliant homages to a rich spectrum of poetic heroes. The method is mostly discursive, but with a tercet-driven artistry that took hold of me and wouldn't let go as I read it straight through on a bus from Washington, D.C. to Manhattan!. Loved it."
—Francisco Aragon