Soto is one of the most important voices in Chicano literature. He has memorably portrayed the life, work, and joys of the Mexican American agricultural laborer. Furthermore, he has done this with great poetic skill. He has an eye for the telling image in his poetry and prose, and he has the ability to create startling and structurally effective metaphors. Each of his poems has a design. One aspect of that design is his frequent use of an ironic reversal to resolve the poetic structure. His style is concrete and rooted in the language of the fields and the barrio. There are many significant themes in Soto’s poetry. One of the earliest and most persistent is his view of the natural world as a wasteland. Although he uses natural imagery, nature is never benign or pastoral. It is, instead, harsh and unrelenting. It scars those who are nakedly exposed to it from dawn to nightfall. A related theme is Soto’s refusal to yield to the temptation to evoke a transcendental view of nature. His heroes are obliterated from that world; they cannot and do not transcend it. - Soto does, however, modulate his bleak view of the human condition when he writes about childhood. That state is filled with a quest for knowledge and experience. In the poem “Chuy,” the young speaker may be naïve or mistaken in his idealized love; however, he does manage to pass through his experiences and gain some wisdom, and he does not give in to cynicism. In the later poems, Soto contrasts the bleak conditions of his childhood with the innocence and privilege of his own daughter. In “Small Town with One Street,” for example, he shows his daughter a young boy in Fresno whom he says is an image of himself as a child. The daughter is shocked to see that poor and troubled image of her apparently powerful father. Soto did not alter his pessimistic view of the world as he grew older and prospered. In “The Way Things Work,” the speaker inventories the expenses of