Go to Copper Canyon Press, Changing Hands Bookstore, or Amazon for further information.

 

The Dangerous Shirt.  Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2009.

 

Poems.

 

***

 

Available May 1, 2009.

 

Ron Slate review.

 

 

Publisher Description:

 

Alberto Ríos’s new poems—magical wormholes through mundane reality—create an improbably true space where human bodies fall through floorboards, prickly feelings of limbs “fallen asleep” are stars buzzing under the skin, and ironed shirts hanging in a closet take on a foreboding sense of danger. Together they are a book of magical realism and cultural physics seeking the “also-moment”—the probable and imaginative directions a single moment might become. “Science may be our best way of understanding the world,” Ríos writes in one poem, “but it may not be our best way of living in it.”

 

          The shirt in my closet is dangerous.
          I shouldn’t have ironed it.

          Because I have, I will put it on.
          If I put it on, I will be dressed.

          If I am dressed, I will be drawn toward the door,
          The door and not the couch—the door . . .