Leo Romero — Fish Drum #4: Desert Nights, signed with original drawing (Santa Fe, 1989)

What this magazine is

Leo Romero is a major Chicano poet of New Mexico. He won a Pushcart Prize for his poem "What the Gypsies Told My Grandmother While She Cried in the Tomato Patch" and his collection Agua Negra (Ahsahta Press, 1981) is on the syllabus for any contemporary Chicano-poetry course. He published with Arte Público Press, San Marcos Press, and a number of small literary magazines through the 1980s and 1990s. Desert Nights — the poem sequence that fills this issue — appeared in Berkeley Poetry Review, Chicano-Riquena, A Decade of Hispanic Literature (the Arte Público Press anthology), Puerto del Sol, Fish Drum, and the Sonora Review in various forms. The Fish Drum #4 issue is the first single-volume devoted entirely to the sequence.

Fish Drum Magazine was an important Santa Fe small-press literary magazine founded and edited by Robert Winson (1959–1995), a poet, Buddhist practitioner, and small-press editor who ran the magazine out of his home at 626 Kathryn Avenue in Santa Fe from 1988 until his early death from leukemia in 1995. Fish Drum was a quirky, deliberately under-produced literary journal that published Leo Romero, Robert Creeley, Joanne Kyger, Philip Whalen, and other West Coast and Southwest poets at a moment when small-press distribution was still entirely a matter of mailing lists and bookstore consignment. The magazine became a posthumous Robert Winson archive after his death and is now collected by university libraries (UC San Diego, University of Buffalo) and Beat-and-after-Beat poetry scholars.

This issue itself is the entire Desert Nights sequence as Leo Romero arranged it, with a brief introduction (the only part not under Leo Romero's copyright), illustrations by Romero in his own hand, and a back-cover author note. The cover linocut and the inside drawings are also by Romero.

Why this copy matters

This is not just a signed copy. The colophon page carries:

• "Leo Romero" signature in the upper right, in dark ink, in the author's running script.
• "For Rey" inscription in the same hand.
• An original portrait drawing by Leo Romero — two faces, executed in the same dark ink as the signature, with characteristic Romero linework consistent with the printed cover and interior illustrations.
• A second signature "Leo" in cursive at the bottom right.

The book is therefore a unique artifact: a printed magazine issue of regional literary significance, presentation-inscribed by the author with an original drawing made specifically for the recipient. For Leo Romero collectors, that combination — signed-with-art, presentation copy — is the top tier of the Romero collecting hierarchy. The donor's penciled annotation "out of print — signed by author" indicates the donor knew what they had.

Robert Winson’s signature pool is closed (he died in 1995). Leo Romero is still actively living and signing as of 2026, but his Fish Drum-era signed copies are increasingly difficult to source as the small-press magazines themselves disappear from the secondary market.

Multi-part bibliographic record

How it came in

Donated in May 2026 through NMLP. Donor scenario anonymized per archive policy. The donor's annotation in pencil ("out of print — signed by author") indicates personal knowledge of the issue's provenance and value. The recipient of the inscription — "Rey" — is unidentified; the inscription suggests a presentation copy from the author at a Santa Fe-area reading or signing in 1989 or shortly after.

Where it's going

Likely route: a Chicano-poetry scholar at UNM or NMSU, a small-press archive (UC San Diego Mandeville Special Collections, University at Buffalo Poetry Collection), or a private Leo Romero / Fish Drum Magazine collector. The original-drawing signed copy is genuinely rare; this is among the highest-tier Leo Romero items I've handled.