The Concrete River
Poems
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A mesmerizing collection of poems of urban pain and immigrant alienation, humming with a current of genuine beauty and the pulse of lifeThe Concrete River’s poems are dispatches from city corners that CNN viewers never see, that few dare visit, and that fewer still manage to escape. Rodríguez sings corridos of barrios and busted Chicanos trying to make it in L.A. and Chicago, from ballads of Watts’s broken glass to blues played alongside a tequila bottle under an elevated train. But the music also captures moments of true beauty amid the hard urban surfaces, where the cries of the ’hood “deliver sacrifices / of sound and flesh, / as a mother’s milk flows,” while love and community offer renewed hope. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Luis J. Rodríguez including rare images from the author’s personal collection.
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Rodriguez ( Poems Across the Pavement ) writes eloquently of ``a severed America,'' of Mexicans exiled to ``the armed camp called East Los Angeles,'' of laid-off laborers and evicted families--in short, of a populace locked out of privilege and prosperity. Turned away, they turn fury pk and desire inward--and implode. In the title poem, homeboys gather on the cement banks of the L.A. River to inhale aerosol fumes. Their ensuing visions transform ``an urban-spawned / Stream of muck'' into ``a flow of clear liquid / On a cloudless day''--yet end in near suffocation. However, Rodriguez's men and women are more often the victims of the anger of others--especially the police. A moving elegy, ``The Best of Us'' tells how a few words exchanged by a young Mexican and the police end in the man's murder. But while violence is always on the verge of eruption, beauty also blossoms in unusual places. As a couple dances in a dive, the poet notes ``how a hand opens slightly, / shaped like a seashell, / in the small / of a back.'' This poetry is of the barrio yet stubbornly refuses to be confined in it--Rodriguez's perceptive gaze and storyteller's gift transport his world across neighborhood boundaries.
