Following his break-through first volume of poems, Through the Years (2010), and its successor, Roberta and Other Poems (2011), Ricardo Quinones has upped the ante with a generous selection from those earlier volumes and additions from a ready supply of new poems presented here. A Sorting of the Ways: New and Selected Poems contains such poems as The Grafting Tree, a mythical marriage between a giant oak and a chair; Ten and More, the record of a ten-year-old's deflating experience of the Korean War after the jubilation of 1945 and the end of WWII; To Pick a Penny, another far-reaching poem about the magic qualities of a penny; and Spoiler Speech, the fragile hold of civilized consciousness against the uprising of a primitive rage. The volume also announces the demise of the popular Wallet Poems, mainly by virtue of their own superabundance and their replacement by a new kind of verse, Bloc Notes.In the poem A New Beginning, Quinones takes the gamble of expressing his own philosophical and moral desideratum as to the nature of art and society, thus enacting his belief that at sometime a writer-poet must come to grips with those things he thinks essential if a society is to be reborn. | A Sorting of the Ways by Ricardo Quinones, Paperback | Indigo Chapters