The Portable Famine offers poems from Rane Arroyo’s years of being an “interior exile” as a gay, Puerto Rican writer from the Midwest whose newest journeys have taken him throughout America, the Caribbean and Europe.  "The more I travel, the more conscious I’ve become of the fact that I don’t fit easily anywhere,” said Arroyo.  “It is like being homesick for an imaginary place.” 

Arroyo addresses sensitive issues such as prejudice with a sense of humor and irony.  In “Mayberry, RFD” Arroyo writes, “Poor Opie / taught to fear jalapenos / Even in Imaginary America / America has to be imagined.”          

The Portable Famine is Arroyo’s sixth book.  His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and journals such as Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner and Quarterly West.  Arroyo has won the Carl Sandburg Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Stonewall Books National Chapbook Prize, and The Sonora Review Chapbook Award.  Arroyo is a professor of English at the University of Toledo, where he directs the creative writing program.

The Portable Famine is available from BkMk Press and from other wholesale and retail outlets.  It is $13.95 in trade paperback, ISBN 1-886157-53-7.