The Dangerous Shirt

Copper Canyon Press • 2009

“Discursive yet aglitter with images, often abstract and yet insistently regional, the ninth collection from the Arizona-based Ríos (The Theater of Night) includes something for almost everyone. A plethora of quiet poems explore such basic concepts as body and spirit, life and death, phenomenology and circumstance: 'Night surrounds the sun as well, which tries every day// So hard to make us think otherwise'; 'I am stuck inside the house of myself, my address... squarely in that place between// What I remember and what I can guess.'” — Publishers Weekly