The Concrete River

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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. (June)

Library Journal

These poems are contemporary reports from the underside of American culture. They consider the homeless, the unemployed, the exploited working class, the dispossessed of the American Dream who occupy the tenements within ``the miasmic draft of side-street America.'' As a former steelworker, carpenter, truck driver, and refinery worker, Rodriguez writes from the inside out, with great knowledge, passion, and compassion. His journalist background allows him to report the stories that often fail to make the front pages of the daily news. The poems and stories in this collection orbit the Chicano experience of Watts and East L.A., where ``the song of our wails,/ the wails of our song,/ thundering against the sides of this city of angels/so far removed from heaven.'' Rodriguez shows us how anger can also be an expression of love. Highly recommended for contemporary poetry and multicultural collections.-- Thom Tammaro, Moorhead State Univ., Minn.