Winner of the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry

Always Danger blends a sense of menace, of ever-present harm, with an almost painterly devotion to the images central to these poems. As good books often are, this is a book of obsessions: everyone here is hurt or maimed, has lost or is losing. We're presented a world few would choose to live in, though many inhabit, without choice. To the extent that Hernandez is interested in offering redemption, it comes almost solely from the poet's attention to and veneration of detail, from an imagination blessed with animate language. Hernandez's achievement is the double witnessing of violence and beauty, the one unavoidable and the other, by the end, earned.  —Bob Hicok

These poems—as urgent, fragile, wily as they are—go beyond the merely personal into the great world. Hernandez's patient, generous eye is on family and stranger, the wounded and the lost, the rich life of the city, its parking lots and freeways, sad yards and heavy metal. Finally, a poet who is not the center of his universe! And it's never simple, the dark joy that comes of such fierce attention.  —Marianne Boruch

Fierce and swift and crisp, David Hernandez’s poems drill their way into the real and always find something alive and surprising there. There’s plenty of cleverness here, but what is special about these poems is an unusual quality of determination. Hernandez’s imagination goes at the world in attack-mode; not to show off, but to discover its human depths.  —Tony Hoagland

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