At the River - by Esteban Rodriguez (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Esteban Rodríguez's At the River asks what it means to live on the border, and how one can come to terms with the symbolic weight of crossing between two worlds.

Combining sharp prose, poetic insight, and a series of incisive black-and-white photographs, At the River journeys to the U.S.-Mexican border in deep south Texas, where our narrator, under his grandmother's watchful eye, contemplates the geography, people, and cultural characteristics that define the region. Over the course of an afternoon, as we cross from one country to the next, we come face to face with fatigued security guards, desperate children, eager vendors, ominous receptionists, and a whole range of characters that mimic that indifference and uncertainty that defines this corner of the earth. In Rodríguez's tender and often humorous style, questions arise about identity, economic privilege, race, the nature of language and silence, and the ways in which belonging becomes more than just the name you were born with. At the River asks not only what it means to live on the border, but how one can come to terms with the symbolic weight of crossing between two worlds.

Review Quotes

"With At the River Esteban Rodríguez has crafted a formidable quest-narrative in search of a collective form of grieving and poetic jus-tice for migrant deaths along the U.S. Mexico borderland, in a chron-icle as well of the social disparities that inform personal memory and the material conditions that shape diasporic life. Rodríguez is a poet empowered with both a sharp sense of formal range and a panoramic view of the past."--Roberto Tejada

About the Author

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently The Lost Nostalgias, and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us. His work has appeared in New England Review, Seneca Review, Poetry Daily, and American Life in Poetry. He is the interviews editor at the EcoTheo Review, senior book reviews editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and associate poetry editor at AGNI. With Jennifer De Leon and Ben Black, he coedited To Never Have Risked Our Lives: An AGNI Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing. He and his wife own and operate Love Letter Coffee in McAllen, Texas.