Every sound is not a wolf

Every sound is not a wolf

Alberto Ríos

Book - 2025

"Told entirely in couplets, this collection balances the harmonies and disharmonies found between people and the natural world, life and death, spirit and body. What does it mean for a speaker to house two languages? And what is "the very real imaginary line between countries"? From Rios's backyard to the Sonoran Desert, from mining towns to lavish rivers, this collection journeys through grief and joy, turned to the "small buzzing of a live world." That the world keeps moving forward, this is miracle enough."--Page 4 of cover.

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Subjects
American poetry > Mexican American authors > 21st century.
poetry.
Poetry.
Genres
poetry
Poetry
Published
Port Townsend, Washington : Copper Canyon Press [2025]
Language
English
Main Author
Alberto Ríos (author)
Physical Description
xiv, 99 pages ; 23 cm
ISBN
9781556597114
  • 1. Enough to make good of it all
  • The Twitch of My Eyebrow
  • For Six Minutes, My Mother
  • Over There
  • The Artifact of Is
  • Quietude
  • Those Years When She Was Acting as if She Were Not Falling
  • Bedroom
  • As if It Were Him
  • Noe, Who Spoke Best When He Did Not Speak
  • The Shortest Song
  • We Still Talk About You
  • 2. The small sirens and screams
  • The Increment That Builds the Night Sky
  • Things So Loud and Their Quietings
  • This Voice That Spring Gives to the Orange Trees
  • I See the Bird and Am the Bird
  • Avenue of the Birds
  • I'm Sorry but I'm Still Evicting the Pigeons
  • A Dictionary of the Wind
  • Twenty Minutes in the Backyard
  • Vernal Equinox in the Desert
  • 3. I became two
  • We Are the Refugee
  • We Are the Mapmakers of Sudden Change
  • Pérez the Mouse
  • Invisible Cord in the Invisible Outlet
  • Raging Sea Monsters
  • After So Much Border Talk, There Comes a Gray Time
  • The Lake but More the River That Feeds It
  • Small Secrets and Gray Books
  • Heading North Through the Sonoran Desert
  • The Mathematics of Oneself
  • 4. We have the power to be rain in the desert
  • The Dance of Her Hand
  • Mining Towns
  • Jugando Hoyos
  • In Service to Service
  • Taking Our Olympic Measure
  • Judging Ourselves
  • 5. Theirs is a short life of light and crawl
  • The Monsoon Wait
  • Old People of the Desert
  • The Yearly Return of the Mockingbird, Who Reads His Story Aloud to the World
  • Woodpecker Knocking
  • The Migration of the Birds Away from Us
  • One More Sonoran Summer
  • Desert Ocean
  • Sonoran Sonnet
  • The Water in All My Names
  • 6. The world, the world
  • Boat In The Forest
  • To Mars From Arizona
  • When They Land
  • The Sheet Music Of Place
  • Today, Again
  • What's Happening
  • Build The Word True
  • Giving Ourselves
  • The Suns And The Moons
  • About the Author
Review by Booklist Review

"The Sonoran Desert--that word sonoran, / It means to be full of sound, sonorous." Poet, short-story writer, and memoirist Ríos (Not Go Away Is My Name, 2020) prods the soundscape of the Southwest, forging deliberate and attentive paths in poems composed of couplets. Ríos repeatedly transforms the Mexican American borderlands, from the dreary neutrality of twilight ("We are standing in a gray hour, dusk or dawn-- / So tired but we cannot say") into a "ready feast, a continuing festival, a traveling circus of imaginary // Delights." Ríos wrangles a wealth of memorable images, from the strangely disorienting ("A downed mesquite, a pelican confused") to the simply striking: "The orange tree in the side yard is full of white blossoms." Turning his poetic eye indoors, Ríos apostrophizes household objects ("Mirror, I would recognize you anywhere") and remarks on their musical qualities, such as the "operatic soprano door hinge." Ever a poet of calculating purview, Ríos revels in the present, even as he casts a wary eye and ear forward: "The future will speak our words. / But there is another language ahead."

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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