Alberto Ríos
Alberto Ríos Poems
In Mexico and Latin America, celebrating one's
Saint's day instead of one's birthday is common.
...
We live in secret cities
And we travel unmapped roads.
We speak words between us that we recognize
...
Mr. Teodoro Luna in his later years had taken to kissing
His wife
Not so much with his lips as with his brows.
This is not to say he put his forehead
...
In the old days of our family,
My grandmother was a young woman
Whose hair was as long as the river.
She lived with her sisters on the ranch
...
One river gives
Its journey to the next.
We give because someone gave to us.
...
On the Mexico side in the 1950s and 60s,
There were movie houses everywhere
...
I've heard this thing where, when someone dies,
People close up all the holes around the house—
...
The wine of uncharted days,
Their unsteady stance against the working world,
...
The fire was so fierce,
So red, so gray, so yellow
That, along with the land,
...
1.
Pies have a reputation.
And it's immediate—no talk of potential
...
Alberto Ríos Biography
Alberto Álvaro Ríos (born 1952 in Nogales, Arizona) is the author of ten books and chapbooks of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir. His books of poems include, most recently, The Dangerous Shirt, along with The Theater of Night, winner of the 2007 PEN/Beyond Margins Award, The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, finalist for the National Book Award, Teodoro Luna's Two Kisses, The Lime Orchard Woman, The Warrington Poems, Five Indiscretions, and Whispering to Fool the Wind, which won the Walt Whitman Award. His three collections of short stories are, most recently, The Curtain of Trees, along with Pig Cookies and The Iguana Killer, which won the first Western States Book Award for Fiction, judged by Robert Penn Warren. His memoir about growing up on the Mexico-Arizona border, called Capirotada, won the Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award and was designated the OneBookArizona choice for 2009. Ríos is the recipient of the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, the Arizona Governor's Arts Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Walt Whitman Award, the Western States Book Award for Fiction, six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction, and inclusion in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, as well as over 300 other national and international literary anthologies. His work is regularly taught and translated, and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music. Ríos is a Regents' Professor at Arizona State University, where he has taught since 1982 and where he holds the further distinction of the Katharine C. Turner Endowed Chair in English. In August 2013 Rios was named Arizona's first state poet laureate, a position he holds until 2015.)
The Best Poem Of Alberto Ríos
Day Of The Refugios
In Mexico and Latin America, celebrating one's
Saint's day instead of one's birthday is common.
I was born in Nogales, Arizona,
On the border between
Mexico and the United States.
The places in between places
They are like little countries
Themselves, with their own holidays
Taken a little from everywhere.
My Fourth of July is from childhood,
Childhood itself a kind of country, too.
It's a place that's far from me now,
A place I'd like to visit again.
The Fourth of July takes me there.
In that childhood place and border place
The Fourth of July, like everything else,
It meant more than just one thing.
In the United States the Fourth of July
It was the United States.
In Mexico it was the día de los Refugios,
The saint's day of people named Refugio.
I come from a family of people with names,
Real names, not-afraid names, with colors
Like the fireworks: Refugio,
Margarito, Matilde, Alvaro, Consuelo,
Humberto, Olga, Celina, Gilberto.
Names that take a moment to say,
Names you have to practice.
These were the names of saints, serious ones,
And it was right to take a moment with them.
I guess that's what my family thought.
The connection to saints was strong:
Mu grandmother's name--here it comes--
Her name was Refugio,
And my great-grandmother's name was Refugio,
And my mother-in-law's name now,
It's another Refugio, Refugios everywhere,
Refugios and shrimp cocktails and sodas.
Fourth of July was a birthday party
For all the women in my family
Going way back, a party
For everything Mexico, where they came from,
For the other words and the green
Tinted glasses my great-grandmother wore.
These women were me,
What I was before me,
So that birthday fireworks in the evening,
All for them,
This seemed right.
In that way the fireworks were for me, too.
Still, we were in the United States now,
And the Fourth of July,
Well, it was the Fourth of July.
But just what that meant,
In this border place and time,
it was a matter of opinion in my family.
Alberto Ríos Comments
You spoke a poem on PBS this evening. I would love to read it in it's entirety but missed the name. I would appreciate it greatly. I am from the east coast and hunger to share your vision. I do not know if it is possible for you to reply to this request. In these times of turmoil your vision was so beautifully honest and touched me greatly.
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4/25/2024 10:06:40 AM # 1.0.0.1119
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