Years ago, back in the days of SASEs and analog journals and zines, I became friends with Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal. For 30 years now, he’s been carving out a humble life in Southern California, working in the mental health field, and writing wry, taciturn, whimsical then sad poems. The work is impossible to pin down: often filled with natural imagery, and a whole cast of people, catches of their conversations…in one moment child-like, and the next, hell and madness. The overall effect creates not just a wildly vivid pastiche of verse but a body of work utterly and solely his own.