The flesh of blood and memory populates the world of BE, a collection of poems that stubbornly seek human identity in an increasingly inhumane world. In micropoetic narratives, the collective I says, "I am here," and proceeds to explore the insular and peculiar ways language, emotion, and truth-telling scour the painful moments of vision that lurk beneath calm and unknown depths.

There are things one cannot ever hope to understand. Does existence precede essence even if essence was available? In a collage of disparate images, the BE poems spin together individual and collective states of feelings to examine the fragments of the human condition in little existences. Picture the man and woman wandering forlornly through an abandoned universe or what happens to some of the people in the villages, in the feudal backwaters where inhabitants become stupefied, brutalized and spiritually impoverished, yet to the outside world appear to suffer a quiet, gentle contentment and peace. Or how we all live by pushing rocks up slopes, or as in some of the poet's characters, by bottling the ashes of a once-dormant-now-live volcano for hawking to tourists as souvenirs.

Brooding. Teasing. Questioning. Doubting. Discovering. The quest could be tragic or comic, but the endeavour could stretch the most ordinary things into new shapes and meanings. As an assemblage, BE proves that it is possible to recover a semblance of reality, if not truth itself, through inferences that quite closely resemble it.

About the Author

Patria Rivera's first poetry collection, Puti/White, was shortlisted for the 2006 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She has also published The Bride Anthology and co-authored Weathering: An Exchange of Poems. Her poetry is featured in Perspectives in Ideology, and in Elana Wolff's Implicate me: short essays on reading contemporary poems. She has received fellowships from the Writers' Union of Canada, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Hawthornden Castle Writers' Retreat. Rivera holds a journalism degree from the University of the Phillipines, and has taken media studies in Australia and Germany. She lives with her family in Toronto's east end.

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