The Anchored Angel

Book excerpt: Jose Garcia Villa was an elusive figure in American literary circles. At the height of his career in the 1940s and 1950s, Villa was part of an elite literary circle that included Marianne Moore, e. e. cummings, Dame Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas, and W.H. Auden. His first book of poetry, Have Come, Am Here, won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 1942, the first of many other awards. Yet, despite numerous accolades, he has been largely dismissed in the United States where his reputation was built and has been criticized in Asian American studies for not being "ethnic" enough. The Anchored Angel rediscovers the work of this fierce: conoclast by reprinting a selection of his writing and providing rich secondary materials, including a complete bibliography.