Like the movie of the same name, the poems in Rancho Notorious are peopled with a colorful cast of characters, all born of the fertile imagination of Richard Garcia. Through narratives, lyric poems and dramatic monologues, Garcia’s characters demonstrate that the idea of self is fluid, one identity easily swapped for another. These are poems with heart, poems that believe that the construction of memory, however fragmentary and inconclusive, is also an act of redemption. Richard Garcia was born in San Francisco in 1941, the son of a Puerto Rican father and a Mexican mother, and is the author of The Flying Garcias, a collection of poetry, and My Aunt Otila’s Spirits, a bilingual children’s book. He lives in Los Angeles, California.