Teodoro Luna's Two Kisses

by Alberto Ríos

Overview

"Boldly playful, gymnastic and surreal."—Leslie Ullman, Kenyon Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393308099
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/17/1992
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)

Editorial Reviews

"There is a miraculous botany in the hybrid village consciousness of Teodoro Luna. It is a marriage of unlikely flowers, say the groom Kierkegaard to the bride Bashevis Singer. But this is something altogether new and glorious, these recent poems of Alberto Ríos."

Norman Dubie

"I love poems that are exact, and that reflect knowledge and are zany. . . . I think Ríos is a delicate poet, and a wise one. I welcome this lovely book."

Gerald Stern

"Wonderfully odd, sometimes sad, never predictable. . . . Ríos continually surprises us in the way he stretches the meaning of words, turning them this way and that."

San Francisco Chronicle - Patty Somlo

To claim, as does the promotion, that ``the marvelous and the real hold hands in this collection'' is an overstatement. There is nothing marvelous in the flat, minimalist lines, characterized by a staccato voice using at the maximum six uncharged words per line. There is a sense of place here, presumably the Mexican-American Southwest, but the ordinary is so prevalent throughout that even that sense is destroyed. Most of the titles convey a banal quality: ``Not Shaving on Some Days,'' ``What a Boy Can Do,'' ``Waiting for My Mother,'' ``Fixing Tires,'' ``How She Finds Me,'' etc. These poems offer no enigmas, no magic, no insights, no depth, no tension, and only a marginal sense of human drama. Devoid of subtlety and innovation, the language and structure might as well be prose. Our young Chicano/Latino poets are well advised to read Vallejo or Philip Lamatia's Touch of the Marvelous instead.-- Ivan Arguelles, Univ. of California at Berkeley

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