Café Select

Truth a dominatrix/asserting love is all... W.M. Rivera writes in Prelude oneof the opening poems in the book you are holding. Truth can be pleasurable andpainful all at the same time like love and sex. This exploration of truth and love asdouble edged sword runs throughCafe Select.Riveras poems are lusty gems theres a fighting spirit and a wise one at work in these poems sometimes wrestlingwith itself other times wrestling with the great spiritual chink in our armor otherpeople and their influence upon us.Rivera kinks it up inCafe and Im not just talking about sado-masochistic sex ora lusty young couple in heat the lines of these poems screw into each other creatinga dense tough lyricism that is coupled with gritty reality: these sperm on the wing.Most wont make it.Some end up in luxuriating in Rimbauds bathtub boaton a pond in Tuileries Gardens. Some laborgrowing pains on death-rows dry concrete.In suburbia most land on fertile ground.Even the run-amucks multiply in manicured cracks.Riveras describing dandelions seeding into air in Manicured Cracks how mostwont make it that the seeds of the weed the most iconic of spring youth images faces a fate like all of us. They might live on to flower again or they wont. As humancounterparts many of us will die along the way and often the worst of us theweeds thrive. What I like is the music in Riveras poems. The alliterative urge thehard consonant sounds very much like later Seamus Heaney acting like sharpedges to confine and crib the lines and feet.Poetry and art are created by privilege and these poems are unabashed at theirmodernist raiment made possible by a privileged life. Paris is both the geographicaland figurative heart of the book. Paris the literal city and Paris the epitome of cul-ture. Rivera is at home on both fronts and relies on music to drive his poetry for-ward; the imagery well thats extra sauce for the pudding and whether hesreferring to the city of lights to art in a gallery or to ancient Occidental poem itdoesnt matter. For Rivera their origins are the same. The urge to create to be re-born.