[In the following review, Davis underscores the role of duality and mutability in Ríos's verse.]

Most of the poems in Alberto Ríos's eighth collection [The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body] are associated with memories of his childhood on the Arizona-Mexico border in the 1950s, which helps account for the duality of his vision, or from his awareness of the Sonoran desert in which he has lived all of his life, which may account for the miragelike shifting and blending of shapes. (The smallest muscle, by the way, is in the ear—see “Some Extensions on the Sovereignty of Science,” the concluding poem.)

Some of the poems, like “My Chili,” are essentially local color, celebrating the varied tastes and effects of the vegetable that bites as it is bitten. Even here, however, duality and mutability are evident—and they are more obvious in other poems, where oranges change into birds and back again; where body parts transpose to other functions; where a coyote becomes a (flying) carpet and dogs become birds; where a nipple is pushed through a button-hole; where water dripping from mesquite trees is “not water but water / Mixed with what it brings from the leaves.”

Given the shifting quality of things, it is no wonder that Ríos says, in the volume's final line, that “Words are our weakest hold on the world.” Of course, as one of Eliot's characters said, “I gotta use words when I talk to you,” and Ríos delights in the paradoxes and uncertainties both of language and of what it attempts to describe. He is most successful, I think, when, on the one hand, he does not strive too hard for paradox and, on the other, when he does not take refuge in mere nostalgia, as in his poem about playing baseball with an artificial lemon, or in portentous striving after significance, as in the conclusion that “It is not this dog's ears that hear. / It is the centuries, / And they answer back.” He is talking about species memory. Fair enough, but sometimes one longs for a dog to be just a dog.

Even so, the (late) Audenesque tone of the opening poem, “A Physics of Sudden Light,” seems entirely successful not only in itself but as a keynote for the collection: “In this light / You are not where you were but you have not moved.” And in “If I Leave You,” addressed to his son, the curt, almost choppy lines reflect the speaker's paradoxical disbelief in heaven and, for his son's sake, the need for it to exist.

Most important, although the poems are grounded in the scenery and rituals of a specific region, at his best Ríos shows by the subtle artifice with which he has crafted them that definitions of his work by region and ethnicity are artificial in the worst sense of the word.