Tree Light Books

$8.50

Review by Claire Jimenez

Pedro Ponce’s chapbook Stories After Goya is a collection of six vignettes inspired by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes’s “Los Caprichos,” a series of etchings depicting different scenes from Spanish life in the late 18th century. In “Los Caprichos,” Goya incorporated elements of the supernatural that emphasized the greed, hypocrisy, and corruption of Spanish nobility and the Inquisition. In the series, Goya’s clergyman look like trolls, his prostitutes like witches. Like Goya, Ponce also tries to reflect the uglier aspects of contemporary culture and politics in the United States, but this time using story. Ponce, like Goya, also incorporates a vocabulary of otherworldly metaphors to make our own reality look strange. Continue reading →