The poems explore the author's boyhood in a Spanish village, his coming of age, and his arrival to California in his 20's. A series of characters marginalized by society interact with the speaker and help him understand his uniqueness and difference. Intimacy, sexuality, and desire are expressed in spare, narrative language.

Praise for Decoding Sparrows...

Pick up this book and inhabit Mariano Zaro's world: his boyhood in a Spanish village, hanging plums in strings from the ceiling with his father, the farmer, the inverted heart shape of a hole in a woman's face, the way the boy needed and was given permission to look, and brought to bear that same humane and unsparing gaze on himself and his own desires, on intimacy and estrangement, on Spain and California. In Decoding Sparrows, Mariano Zaro renders coming of age and hunger in spare and luminous language, an almost crystalline austerity-- each word resonant, each word steadfast. Zaro illuminates, he limns his poems in longing.--Marsha de la O, author of Every Ravening Thing