SOURCE: Deters, Joseph. “Fireworks on the Borderlands: A Blending of Cultures in the Poetry of Alberto Ríos.” Confluencia 15, no. 2 (spring 2000): 28-35.

In the following essay, Deters investigates the role of “spaces” and “borders” in Ríos's verse.

Alberto Ríos is an award winning author of both poetry and short fiction.¹ His book of verse, Whispering to Fool the Wind, won the Walt Whitman Award in 1981 and his first book of short stories, The Iguana Killer, (1984) won the Western States Book Award the same year of its publication.² A commonality of both his verse and prose is that they generally focus on life on and around the borderlands. In much of his creative work, his poetic and narrative voices reveal a child's perspective. In some instances, the reader hears the voice of an individual living out his/her own youth, and at other times, one listens to...