ABSTRACT
The Ice Worker Sings and Other Poems by Andres Montoya gives students a unique opportunity to consider the limitations of notions of beauty, greed, and poetry. The author teaches The Ice Worker Sings and Other Poems in Introduction to United States Latina Literature, an upper-division class taught in Spanish in a Languages, Literature, and Linguistics Department of a research university in Central New York. My students tend to be disproportionately female but generally split between affluent, East Coast, Anglo-Euro students, and working-class East Coast Latinas in a costly private university. Lastly, students become aware of the non-religious sense of our sacredness as a possibility with interpretative power. That is, Montoya proposes the sacred as a way to consider our lives and the lives of others, one that generates radically different readings of our relationship to one another and to our world.
