Mowery has written extensively for the Gale Group. In the following essay, he considers the existential philosophy present in Ríos' poem "Island of the ThreeMarias."

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda once said, "Our duty, then, as we understand it, is to express what is unheard of." By this he meant that the poet's task is to investigate, examine, and explore the world from new and different angles. Alberto Ríos used this quotation as the epigraph for his first book, Whispering to Fool the Wind (1982). By doing so, he has adopted it as his writing philosophy. The consequence of this for him is that he must come to grips with the fact that some of the characters he will reveal will not be the beautiful people, but rather they will be the down-trodden or the unsavory members of society. The editors of the Norton...