Sven Birkerts reviewed The Selected Poetry of Gabriel Zaid for Literal, Latin American Voices. An excerpt:
The subject matters of the 42 poems in this collection vary—some are more lyric, others more spiritual, and still others satiric—but their procedure is recognizably that of a single sensibility. Here is a poet who favors both simple imagistic compression, using for his images mainly the materials of the natural order (though here and there an automobile or an elevator will appear), and the dynamic expansions and shifts of perspective made possible by inventive juxtapositions. The final effect, of the individual poems as well as of the book, is of an outward movement, at times that of slow natural growth and at other times of explosion. [Read more]