Suckerpunch
Hernandez, an award-winning poet, turns for the first time to fiction with a beautifully executed, frequently brutal coming-of-age story....The author's imagery, sometimes subtle, sometimes searing, invariably hits its mark. —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
From the opening sentence, the writing shocks, then mesmerizes readers....Hernandez’s solid first YA effort will have readers clamoring for his next work. —Kirkus Reviews
I was so impressed with David Hernandez's beautiful novel. I finished it in two sittings only because I had to walk my dog and eat some food. It deals with the scary mysteries that hover between fathers and sons and brothers with such brutal, unflinching honesty that it feels almost mythical. —Adam Rapp
David Hernandez's bottom-dog existential novel Suckerpunch reminds me of a Freud vs. Dostoevsky slap-down. Writing like the poet he is, Hernandez crafts this tale of rivalry and revenge with pitch perfect gritty lyricism. A terrific debut from a real contender.
—Ron Koertge[ Read excerpt ]
Always Danger
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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A House Waiting for Music
David Hernandez sings about the self and his community and transforms the magic of language into unforgettable poems. His poetic journeys seek a knowledge as they drive for revelation in the modern world. While reading these poems, I was reminded of the lessons learned from the great Chilean poet, Pablo Nerudato know the self is to know poetry. Ray GonzalezA House Waiting for Music is a remarkable collection of poems. David Hernandez is like a hip, urban William Staffordhis quiet, subtle poems force us to see what we often miss, lost in the rush of our lives. He has a deft touch for finding the striking juxtaposition, the odd fragment of grace. Hernandez embraces the world, even when it seems irredeemable and without mercy, and he celebrates the small daily miracles of survival. The music of these warm, intimate poems resonates, and lingers. Jim Daniels
David Hernandez's subjects are variedfrom lust to TV to the cruelty of children to the grass under his feetbut running through all his work is a sense of the quotidian disasters we survive in order to see our lives and the lives of those around us. In his poems "the world is visible again, / stumbling forward and beautiful." A deft, sly, and heartful book, A House Waiting for Music contains enough verbal hip-hop to get the cops called. Listen up! Kim Addonizio
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