SOURCE: Davis, Robert Murray. Review of The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body by Alberto Ríos. World Literature Today 77, no. 2 (July-September 2003): 105.

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...