Shadowboxing: poems & impersonations

by Joseph Rios

Overview

Borrowing the poetic language found in boxing lore and in the Rocky films, Shadowboxing pieces together a poetic portrait of Josefo, a Chicano adolescent working and becoming a poet in the farm territories of Central California. Rios confounds the relationship between author, speaker, and subject within various forms and, at times, across genre. He challenges the usefulness of poetry and stands upon oral histories to demystify California’s overlooked labor class. Rios invites the reader to enter Josefo’s world of memory, experience, and talk, of packinghouse mentors, storytelling grandmothers, parable-sharing plumbers, smooth talking truck drivers, and infinitely patient literature professors.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632430434
Publisher:	Omnidawn Publishing, Inc.
Publication date:	10/03/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

JOSEPH RIOS was born in Clovis, California. He is a VONA alumnus, a Macondo fellow, and a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Los Angeles.

What People are Saying About This

Willie Perdomo

“‘Voice’ and ‘epic’ are words that are distributed loosely in the poetry world. But I use them with all heat that I can muster. Joseph Rios does for Xican@ poetics what Jean Toomer’s Cane did for the Harlem Renaissance: he radicalizes it into an undeniable modernity. And like Toomer, Rios uses all the genres at his disposal. He uses the epistle, the dramatic dialogue, epigrams from popular culture, and even has a Romantic touch. Pablo Neruda hoped for a poetry that could feed us with the bounty of bread. Rios’s audiences, his carneles, want to know if poetry can fix a broken down Cherokee. That is what the poet, in the shadow of machismo and financial pragmatism, is up against.”

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/18/2017
Rios draws readers into a combination coming-of-age story and satire of academic pretension in his audacious debut, writing through the figure of a Chicano adolescent (and, presumably, alter ego), Josefo, in the farming locales of Central California. “This book? It’s just an attempt to impersonate myself,” Rios writes, and he employs stage direction, dramatic monologue, oral history, and epistolary text to depict Josefo’s relationships with parents, lovers, and laborers, some of whom display skepticism toward his literary endeavor. Given the framework motif of boxing, the narrative stance is often playfully combative (“Want to impress me? Get a Dream Act passed with no military option. Support literacy in every hood and Hamlet. Teach Hamlet in every hood”). He evinces palpable fury on behalf of the exploited, yet he never misses an opportunity for a ribald comment: “Something’s burning in the house./ Could be Tio’s beard.” And he is as felicitous with musical vernacular as with literary theory; his aesthetic is formidably omnivorous, referencing Borges and Biggie, Milosz and Dennis Cooper. Rios collages genres while allowing for traditionally lyrical odes and elegies, describing with admiration a fellow poet character: “everything he said was in a low glasspack tenor—like a work truck idling in an oil spotted driveway.” (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Rios’s debut collection, Shadowboxing: poems and impersonations, published last year by Omnidawn, is a middle finger to the institution in both form and content. What makes this collection a knockout is its investigation of the self through Josefo, a laid-back farm boy turned scholar whose concept of love, language, narrative, truth, family, academia, psyche, and music start and facilitate Rios’s objective to destabilize American notions of tradition. There is a pride in this collection that reinvigorates the Latinx/Chicanx community to find strength in their history, to love that history, to not be erased. Rios asks: What is poetry that doesn’t save nations and people?"

The Rumpus

Rios draws readers into a combination coming-of-age story and satire of academic pretension in his audacious debut.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)


“In a dazzling display, Rios blends prose poems, dramatic dialogs, and punch-in-the-gut verse to record the life of Chicano adolescent Josefo, not incidentally showing us working-class California along the way.”—Book Verdict


“Shadowboxing by Joseph Rios. Goddamn.”—Chiwan Choi, The Millions


“"In the meditative and seductive prose poem, “There Is No Tomorrow” Rios delivers a provocative manifesto that clarifies ‘the need for direct action’ as embodied in public expressions of unrest at American universities:

‘There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so / odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t / even passively take part and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the / gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to /
make it stop.
—Sonja James, The Journal

From the Publisher

11/15/2017
In a dazzling display, Rios blends prose poems, dramatic dialogs, and punch-in-the-gut verse to record the life of Chicano adolescent Josefo, not incidentally showing us working-class California along the way. There are "Two Josefos," the hardworking, hard-drinking laborer who wants to make it in the ring—sections are styled as rounds, and Rocky is referenced—and the aspiring poet who can cite Czeslaw Milosz and (presumably) write a line like, "That moon over 24th street just as loud/ as gold shoes in the mud"). Both foul-mouthed and astute, raucous Josefo is a fully realized character as he punches his way toward his multiple dreams. VERDICT A one-of-a-kind debut; it's easy to imagine both experienced poetry readers and teenage newbies burrowing into this book.

Library Journal