Book excerpt: San Antonio Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla captures her hometown — the city of her ancestors for the past three centuries — in poems that celebrate its history as a cosmopolitan multilingual cultural crossroads. Discover San Antonio’s corazón in Tafolla’s poetry, accompanied by historic and contemporary photographs that convey its enduring sense of place. The little river that has charmed so many rises at “the biological hub of the northern half of this hemisphere” (Dr. Karen Stothert) in a spring that Frederick Law Olmsted described as being “among the gems of the natural world.” A century ago, San Antonio gave Oscar Wilde “a thrill of strange pleasure.” J. Frank Dobie claimed that “every Texan has two hometowns — his own and San Antonio,” and Will Rogers declared it to be “one of the three unique cities of America.” To Larry McMurtry, “San Antonio has kept an ambiance that all the rest of our cities lack.” Carmen Tafolla calls forth the soul of this place — the holy home of the waters, called Yanaguana by los Indios — and celebrates the many cultures that have made of it “un rebozo bordado de culturas y colores.”