Go to Amazon for further information.  Originally published by Sheep Meadow Press.

 

The Lime Orchard Woman.  New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1988.

 

Poems.

 

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Some reviews

 

“He is struck by a vision that pushes him forward in passion. His poetry is a delight.”—The New York Times

“In fifty years, when the revolutions of the American language are clearer to us, most of the poetry of the 1980s will pale beside Rios’. Rios is ‘onto something new’ in his poetry—in the way that the real poets of any time always are.”—American Book Review 

 

“Alberto Ríos’s poems seem to bubble up through the geologic faults of a landscape volcanic with its Spanish/Indian past.  Only in the unique shimmering light of the Southwest, and with a language infatuated by the tenderness and passions of another tongue, could his gallery of characters come to life, fractured like Cubist portraits but heartbreakingly real, or rather, veering between reality and fantasy.  After reading this new collection, I am ready to call Alberto Ríos one of the finest young poets anywhere.”—Edward Field

“Here the cerebral and the earthy are vividly combined, and the resulting tension between reality and fantasy yields fresh and often powerful imagery. Deeply rooted in the physical, these poems posit sensuous experience, a strain of music, a kiss, the maturation of a woman’s body as the soil from which abstractions about human nature and existence might grow. Thus, a man’s ritual of shaving becomes a symbolic act of withdrawal: “Every day he was leaving her, / But just a little at a time. / Each day he shaved off something of himself. / One day he would be altogether different.” Rather than drawing direct explanations, Rios (Five Indiscretions) illustrates through startling juxtapositions. As the poems are neither linear nor logical, this technique is at once frustrating and provocative. If one wishes for more intellectual depth, the raw power of the imagery lends the verses an almost surrealistic quality, enhanced by the richness of language and the originality of vision.”—Publishers Weekly