The Valley, Esteban Rodríguez
In this visceral collection, poet Esteban Rodríguez introduces the voice of a boy straddling the valley between two geographies, two generations, two languages. Under the relentless Texas sun, these poems traverse desert landscapes and moonlit fields carved by an aching loneliness and gentle laughter. Here, a father crosses a river of starlight and corpses, a child is awed by a mirage-like circus and the gilded rims of lowriders, and a mother travels home to Mexico to heal the decay of her body. The Valley explores the tenuous boundaries between citizenship and belonging, memory and tradition, silence and forgetting. Rodríguez’s poems take us through stories of survival and violence as the young speaker’s imagination tries to make sense of these ruptures. Tender and searching, The Valley offers solace to those of us who must navigate silences and cross borders in order to survive.
“Esteban Rodríguez is at home in the ethereal as well as the temporal. With a baker’s precision, The Valley adds a tablespoon of photography to each cup of poetry, creating a layered portrayal of not only South Texas but of the poet. Rodríguez veers from the political to the personal with astounding ease, comfortably bordering “the father bent beneath the hood of a truck” with “because the moon deems itself holy.” Bring your lunch to read these poems.”
-David Tomas Martinez
“Esteban Rodríguez knows that the valley of the shadow of death is where we all grew up, where there is a river and someone swimming to cross. The Valley is that rare collection of poems where, over and over again, the mythic shimmers in and illuminates the real. The woman in her nightgown is your mother, the man in his garden is your father. They are ordinary, they are divine, somehow. How does it happen we survive this place? “In each of us there is a river,” he writes, “and it’s long gone.” What remains is this ghost, this river of language we chance and cross as we read. What an achievement, this lovely beguiling book.”
-Steve Scafidi