“mahcic gets you open on Riley’s
music. A poet who writes like a master DJ: scratching metaphor,
mixing cultures and re-mixing themes until he infiltrates your
consciousness and makes you recall the gloss before the glitter
while warning you about the wind before the storm.” Tomás Riley’s poems are the
necessary documents we must carry to insure the safe crossing,
the guide by the hand, the finger to the lip, poetry becomes a
paint by numbers game of language, truth and funk. His gaze takes
us across streets as he crosses himself at the corner of 24th
and la Misión, more like the intersection of revolución
and eternidad. This first collection of poems takes pen to pavement,
so do listen closely to the familiar street beating like a thousand
sacred hearts tattooed forever. What you hear in Tomás’s poems
is the vernacular of the streets transformed into cool, lean imagery
that flits through the urban landscape with the swiftness of a
hummingbird. We see choppers hovering over streets and empty lots
of the Mission, hear the sirens of patrol cars, smell the simmering
arroz and ripe mangos, food to bad-rappin’ brothers with
backpacks full of empty dreams and sad young girls with rainbows
on their wet lashes. It is a skillful dance Tomás performs
to connect the mundane, the harsh and the ordinary with its lost
ancestral source and to express that blood legacy with gentle,
human clarity. One of the most exciting new voices to emerge in Chicano poetry that I've heard for a long time. |
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