The Theater of Night

Alberto Ríos

Released on the heels of his National Book Award nomination for poetry, Alberto Ríos’s The Theater of Night is filled with magic, marvel, and emotional truth. Set within a community along the border between the United States and Mexico, Ríos’s poems trace the lives and loves of an elderly couple, Clemente and Ventura, through their childhoods, courtship, and into marriage, maturity, old age, and death. Ríos’s narratives are both surreal and hyperreal, and from the community of these two lives he creates a striking geography unlike any other in American poetry. Like the best storytellers, he charms his readers, making us care deeply for—even love—his characters.

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ISBN: 9781556592591

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 9781556592300

Format: Hardcover

Clemente, in Love, Speaks to Himself in the Mirror

We have, we are told—we are sure—five senses.
This is easy, this is first grade, this is certain.

We know this, five. But look, when I count
I can’t stop: I see ten fingers in front of me

Plain as anything. Ten. You see them, too.
And they move around.

Someone, whoever he is,
He has been keeping something from us.

I see this, now, using my sense of cunning.
That makes six senses quickly and right there.

Clemente, they used to say, pay attention,
Do your work, don’t look up—I know now

What they were up to. I see what they were trying
To do. But it’s over. They can’t stop me anymore.

I can see ten, but I can think a thousand.
The world of a thousand senses—

This opens things up considerably, don’t you think?
They add up right away, and easy, these gifts of mine:

The sense of wonder, horse sense,
The sense of timing, good sense,

Sense enough to come in from the rain.
I will not be stopped. I know what I know.

I feel powerful, I am powerful—Look at me!—
I am the Sense-Man! And I am walking right past you

Straight into and ready for the world. All of you!
All of you! Out of my way!

About the Author

Alberto Ríos, Arizona’s inaugural poet laureate and a recent chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, is the author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently, Not Go Away Is My Name, preceded by A Small Story about the Sky, The Dangerous Shirt, and The Theater of Night, which received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. Published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other journals, he has also written three short story collections and a memoir, Capirotada, about growing up …

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Reviews

“In this rhapsodic series of poems, Ríos presents the story of Ventura and Clemente Ríos, a married couple living near the United States-Mexico border in the first half of the twentieth century. Ríos’s project, indebted to magic realism but rooted in naturalism, proves ambitious. He deftly uses the couple—members, he says, of his ‘extended family’—to explore liminal spaces…” —New Yorker

“… gentle, accessible work that retains its powers within (not despite) its linguistic and stylistic smoothness, and these powers pull the mind and heart awake in ways that only poetry can do.” —Western American Literature