"Juan J. Morales writes: 'It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story,' which is another way of saying, 'It took a thousand journeys to get to mine.' As an artist with Ecuadorian and Puerto Rican bloodlines engaged with the Spanish colonial histories of South America and the Caribbean, Morales explores the legacies of language and landscape, mapping out an expansive poetic portrait of his ancestral homeland. The Siren World is a glorious testimony to the will of the Americas to reconfigure and preserve its cultural identities, which are still thriving and palpable in the heartbeats and 'reconstruction songs' of its native children, its travelers, its bordercrossers, and its poets."

-Rigoberto González

"In The Siren World, Juan J. Morales explores the complexities of identity with grace and humor, passion and irony, arcing across centuries through lessons never learned, voices never heard. Caught between multiple worlds, multiple identities both mistaken and claimed, he offers a unique perspective that challenges many of our assumptions as readers. He may be someone 'who speaks the native tongue' he’s 'never learned,' but he is fluent in the language of poetry. History does indeed come alive in these poems that remind us that we are still living it, and reliving it, moving back, forward, then back again, no matter who we are—and, as Morales reminds us, we’re all still trying to figure that out too."

-Jim Daniels