Librería Samer Atenea
Librería Aciertas (Toledo)
Kálamo Books
Librería Perelló (Valencia)
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Donde los libros
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
“Truth, a dominatrix/asserting love is all...” W.M. Rivera writes in “Prelude,” oneof the opening poems in the book you are holding. Truth can be pleasurable, andpainful all at the same time, like love and sex. This exploration of truth and love asdouble edged sword runs throughCafe Select.Rivera’s poems are lusty gems,there’s a fighting spirit, and a wise one at work in these poems, sometimes wrestlingwith itself, other times wrestling with the great spiritual chink in our armor, otherpeople and their influence upon us.Rivera kinks it up inCafe, and I’m not just talking about sado-masochistic sex, ora lusty young couple in heat, the lines of these poems screw into each other creatinga dense tough lyricism that is coupled with gritty reality:these ‘sperm on the wing.’Most won’t make it.Some end up in luxuriating in Rimbaud’s bathtub boaton a pond in Tuileries Gardens. Some laborgrowing pains on death-row’s dry concrete.In suburbia most land on fertile ground.Even the run-amucks multiply in manicured cracks.Rivera’s describing dandelions seeding into air in “Manicured Cracks,” how mostwon’t make it, that the seeds of the weed, the most iconic of spring youth images,faces a fate like all of us. They might live on to flower again, or they won’t. As humancounterparts, many of us will die along the way, and often the worst of us, theweeds, thrive. What I like is the music in Rivera’s poems. The alliterative urge, thehard consonant sounds, very much like later Seamus Heaney, acting like sharpedges to confine and crib the lines and feet.Poetry and art are created by privilege, and these poems are unabashed at theirmodernist raiment made possible by a privileged life. Paris is both the geographicaland figurative heart of the book. Paris, the literal city, and Paris the epitome of cul-ture. Rivera is at home on both fronts, and relies on music to drive his poetry for-ward; the imagery, well that’s extra sauce for the pudding, and whether he’sreferring to the city of lights, to art in a gallery, or to ancient Occidental poem, itdoesn’t matter. For Rivera their origins are the same. The urge to create, to be re-born.
