What is Gary sotos poem ambition about?

Answer 1

If you're looking for something atmospheric, Ambition is a great example from Soto's works. It seems to be focusing on a "guys' night" where friends have gathered to make chicken and talk. Soto immediately manages to catch your attention with the slightly absurd sounding first lines, "For years our ambition was to eat/ Chicken." It pulls you right into a mindset. Soto manages to keep his phrasing of the scene from sounding mundane through many techniques. Such as giving the chicken, cooking on the hibachi, the persona of being "a Latin mob" (line 19) and one of the characters actually taming it with a fork. Soto seems to enjoy breathing life into the inanimate, for he give food the ability to "climb to the their elbows" and the moon the ability to make their chairs disappear (line 24-31). Over all, the tone calm and I would even go as far as to described it as mystical. This is just a guys' night, they're sitting around, eating, drinking beer, making getting a little philosophic. But Soto brings such life to it, such warmth, such detail, one cannot help but live in that world with the characters.