The New Anthology of American Poetry: Vol. III: Postmodernisms 1950-Present

ALBERTO RÍOS

449 Alberto Ríos Ø sentences, the way they said, “Ya’Allah!” when astonished, or “ya’ani” for “I mean”— a crushed glass under the feet still shines. But the child of Hebron sleeps with the thud of her brothers falling and the long sorrow of the color red. 1998 In “The Small Vases from Hebron,” Nye draws upon her Palestinian family background as well as her time spent in the Middle East. Hebron, an ancient city in the West Bank of the Palestinian territories and a place sacred to both Muslims and Jews, has been the focus of tension between the Israelis and Palestinians since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. ALBERTO RÍOS b. 1952 Alberto ríos was raised in Nogales, Arizona, on the U.S.–Mexican border in the Sonoran Desert. His poetry recreates what he has called “a place of exchange ,” a threshold space that “reckons with the world a little differently.” His poems of childhood memory evoke various kinds of “in-between” states—between the English and Spanish languages, American and Mexican cultures, childhood and puberty (in “Madre Sofía”), and life and death (in “Mi Abuelo”). Ríos is a famously close observer of people and places, but he also departs from everyday reality to suggest eerie, haunted experiences. He employs a style of “magical realism,” a Latin American mode of combining empirically accurate detail with dreamlike ones to locate imaginative and emotional truths that lie hidden beneath surfaces. Ríos’s memory poems—on the border between fantasy and reality, between inward consciousness and outward appearance—transform childhood experience into a realm that is rich and strange. Ríos’s father was born in Chiapas, Mexico, and his mother immigrated to the United States from Lancashire, England. His paternal grandfather, whose presence is recalled in “Mi Abuelo,” participated in the struggle for democracy during the Mexican revolution of 1910–20. Ríos initially spoke both English and Spanish, but he lost much of his Spanish in grade school, only relearning it later Ø Alberto Ríos 450 on. He received bachelor’s degrees in English and psychology, and an M.F.A. in creative writing, all from the University of Arizona. He is now Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University. In addition to poetry, Ríos writes short fiction and memoir. His writing has won the Walt Whitman Award, the Western Literature Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award, and the Latino Hall of Fame Award. His work has been adapted to both dance and music. further reading Sheilah Britton. “Discovering the Alphabet of Life.” Research magazine 11.2 (1997); http:// researchmag.asu.edu/articles/alphabet.html. Susan McInnis. “Interview with Alberto Rios.” Glimmer Train 26 (1998): 105–21. Alberto Ríos. Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. — — — —. The Curtain of Trees: Stories. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. — — — —. The Dangerous Shirt. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2009. — — — —. The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2002. — — — —. Whispering to Fool the Wind. New York: Sheepmeadow Press, 1982. Mi Abuelo Where my grandfather is is in the ground where you can hear the future like a movie Indian with his ear at the tracks. A pipe leads down to him so that sometimes he whispers what will happen to a man in town or how he will meet the best dressed woman tomorrow and how the best man at her wedding will chew the ground next to her. Mi Abuelo1 is the man who speaks through all the mouths in my house. An echo of me hitting the pipe sometimes to stop him from saying my hair is a sieve is the only other sound. It is a phrase that among all others is the best, he says, and my hair is a sieve is sometimes repeated for hours out of the ground when I let him, which is not often. An abuelo should be much more than a man like you! He stops then, and speaks: I am a man 1. “My Grandfather” (Spanish). Madre Sofía Ø 451 who has served ants with the attitude of a waiter, who has made each smile as only an ant who is fat can, and they liked me best, but there is nothing left. Yet I know he ground green coffee beans as a child, and sometimes he will talk about his wife, and...