The poetry of David Mura has been praised for its verbal music, its contradictions of rage and reconciliation, and its curious sense of hope in a world riven by racial and cultural differences. Of his first book, After We Lost Our Way, Amy Clampitt said, "The range and force of his evocative gift are counterbalanced by a quick intelligence and a redemptive and surprising tenderness". In The Colors of Desire, his second book of poems, Mura explores the connections between race and sexuality, history and identity, through the lens of desire. From an Issei farmer's lament for an America he knew before internment to a French prostitute who speaks of her Asian lovers, the various voices of these poems reveal how cultural desire shapes personal history and how collective history shapes individual desire. In the title poem, Mura assembles a collage of memory and history that links America's racism to our sexual culture, whose pornography equates whiteness with beauty and color with degradation. In the longest sequence of poems, "The Affair", Mura portrays an obsessive, d | The Colors of Desire by David Mura, Paperback | Indigo Chapters