The Theater of Night - Hardcover

Alberto Rios

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556592302 ISBN 13: 9781556592300

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2006

Synopsis

“Ríos writes in a serenely clear manner.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Ríos' verse inhabits a country of his own making, sometimes political, often personal, with the familiarity and pungency of an Arizona chili.”—The Christian Science Monitor

Following the success of his National Book Award nomination, Alberto Ríos' new book is filled with magic, marvel, and emotional truth. Set along the elusive Mexican-American border, his poems trace the lives and loves of an elderly couple, Clemente and Ventura, through their childhood and courtship to marriage, maturity, old age, and death.

From The Chair She Sits In

I've heard this thing where, when someone dies,
People close up all the holes around the house—
The keyholes, the chimney, the windows,
Even the mouths of the animals, the dogs and the pigs.
It's so the soul won't be confused, or tempted.
It's so when the soul comes out of the body it's been in,
But which doesn't work anymore,
It won't simply go into another one
And try to make itself at home,
Pretending as if nothing happened . . .

Ríos' narratives are both surreal and hyper-real, creating the hard, sweet weave of two lives becoming one. The National Book Award judges noted that Ríos is a “poet of reverie,” and like the best of storytellers he charms his readers, making us care deeply for—even love—these people we read.

Alberto Ríos is the poet laureate of Arizona and teaches at Arizona State University. He is the author of eight books of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir. Ríos is the recipient of numerous awards, and his work is included in over 175 national and international literary anthologies. His work is regularly taught and translated and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music.

About this title

About the Author

Alberto Ríos served as the Arizona State Poet, teaches at Arizona State University, and is the author of nine books of poetry, three collections of short stories, an a memoir. His book of poems, The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, was nominated for the National Book Award in Poetry.

Reviews

The latest from the prolific Rios (Capirotada, etc.), poet laureate of the state of Arizona, hews closely and yet imaginatively to the life stories of its double protagonists: Clemente and Ventura (who may, or may not, be the poet's grandparents) grow up, fall in love, raise a family and enter a thoughtful old age in the Sonora Desert along the U.S.-Mexico border, and their intertwined decisions and meditations depict at once the particularities of the Southwestern landscape and the gentle wisdom they glean from their own life course. Rios begins lyrically enough, with "star-filled summer nights/ In the high desert," promising (and delivering) "stories with always something of a sad look in the telling." The borderlands river which (Rios writes) "was their honeymoon" becomes "everyone's and not just theirs," as they become symbols of the poet's Mexican-American inheritance, and of the truths a long life can reveal: "The things of the desert, even the hills themselves,/ They grow this way for a reason." Rios favors long lines, end-stopped and rhymeless couplets, and quiet, often reassuring asides. The results can end up repetitive, even predictable, and may not expand his already considerable following. (Mar.)
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In this rhapsodic series of poems, Ríos presents the story of Ventura and Clemente Rios, a married couple living near the United States-Mexico border in the first half of the twentieth century. Rios's project, indebted to magic realism but rooted in naturalism, proves ambitious. He deftly uses the couple—members, he says, of his "extended family"—to explore liminal spaces: they live in a border town surrounded by "invisible" walls ("Walk beyond the wall and you walk / On the ground of the other world"), a place where the divide between body and soul, and body and body, narrows: "He stood slightly inside her / As if the lines of their bodies / blurred briefly." When Ventura dies, the aged Clemente cries to her, "I want to be the high sheriff / Of the space between us."
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556592302
• ISBN 13: 9781556592300
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96