ABSTRACT

Winner of the American Book Award and the University of California, Irvine Chicano/Latino Literary Prize, The Ice Worker Sings and Other Poems by Andrés Montoya (1968–99) gives students a unique opportunity to consider the limitations of notions of beauty, greed, and poetry. I teach The Ice Worker Sings and Other Poems in Introduction to US Latin@ Literature, an upper-division class taught in Spanish in a Languages, Literature, and Linguistics Department of a research university in Central New York. My classes count toward a degree in Spanish but because I ground our study of literature by analyzing intersectional relations of ethnicity, class, race, gender and sexual orientation, legal status, and able-bodiedness, my classes are often cross-listed in Latino/Latin American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies, counting toward those degrees.