Teodoro Luna's Two Kisses: Poems

by Alberto Alvaro Ríos

"Boldly playful, gymnastic and surreal."â Leslie Ullman, Kenyon Review

Genres: Poetry

95 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

In 1952, Alberto Alvaro Ríos was born on the American side of the city of Nogales, Arizona, on the Mexican border. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Arizona in 1974 and a MFA in Creative Writing from the same institution in 1979.

He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Dangerous Shirt (Copper Canyon Press, 2009); The Theater of Night (2007); The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (2002), which was nominated for the National Book Award; Teodora Luna's Two Kisses(1990); The Lime Orchard Woman (1988); Five Indiscretions (1985); and Whispering to Fool the Wind (1982), which won the 1981 Walt Whitman Award, selected by Donald Justice.

Other books by Ríos include Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir (University of New Mexico Press, 1999), The Curtain of Trees: Stories (1999), Pig Cookies and Other Stories (1995), and The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories of the Heart (1984), which won the Western States Book Award.

Ríos's poetry has been set to music in a cantata by James DeMars called "Toto's Say," and on an EMI release, "Away from Home." He was also featured in the documentary Birthwrite: Growing Up Hispanic. His work has been included in more than ninety major national and international literary anthologies, including the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.

"Alberto Ríos is a poet of reverie and magical perception," wrote the judges of the 2002 National Book Awards, "and of the threshold between this world and the world just beyond."

He holds numerous awards, including six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction, the Arizona Governor's Arts Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Since 1994 he has been Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he has taught since 1982. He lives in Chandler, Arizona.

Reviews

[connie · Rating 1 out of 5]

[one of my reads for booktubeathon 2018, for the pretty spine challenge]

2/5 stars

another collection i was disappointed by. i just couldn't gel with the style and found myself growing bored reading the collection, there were elements of things that were written about that i didn't care for all that much. i'd enjoy it if we did look at this poet, however, and i'm still holding out that this comes up in first semester

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the poem “Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses.” In fact, I found it more than ten years ago when I was in high school, and I enjoyed it enough, that my art major used it on an art project and gave it to me. So, I’ve always wanted to tackle more of Rios’s work.

Unfortunately, the majority of this volume managed to touch on a number of my pet peeves. In short, I found the poems to be too surreal, consistently too abstract for my tastes. Rios obviously has a fertile mind for images, but the images were a little out of reach, a little unmoored from the life I recognize. Perhaps that’s more my problem than Rios’s, but that was my impression.

I opened the book with the poem “Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses” firmly embedded in my mind. When I closed the book, that was the only poem that went with me.

[Sunni · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite collections of poems ever! Rios is so different from anyone else I've read. He takes family stories, imagined moments, and a southwestern landscape and turns them into tall tales and breathtaking pieces. He can write both narrative and lyrical together, which is hard to do, and on top of that is both funny and terribly sad at the same time. I'm a fan!

[Mark Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

Section 3 is the strongest. I enjoyed the surreal mysticism of much of the poetry, but especially the third section. Worth the read.

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

His one suit coat fit // Like sideburns on a face.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 R586t 1990