CAFÉ SELECT

<p>“Truth a dominatrix/asserting love is all...” W.M. Rivera writes in “Prelude” one</p><p>of the opening poems in the book you are holding. Truth can be pleasurable and</p><p>painful all at the same time like love and sex. This exploration of truth and love as</p><p>double edged sword runs through</p><p>Cafe Select.</p><p>Rivera’s poems are lusty gems</p><p>there’s a fighting spirit and a wise one at work in these poems sometimes wrestling</p><p>with itself other times wrestling with the great spiritual chink in our armor other</p><p>people and their influence upon us.</p><p>Rivera kinks it up in</p><p>Cafe</p><p> and I’m not just talking about sado-masochistic sex or</p><p>a lusty young couple in heat the lines of these poems screw into each other creating</p><p>a dense tough lyricism that is coupled with gritty reality:</p><p>these ‘sperm on the wing.’</p><p>Most won’t make it.</p><p>Some end up in luxuriating in Rimbaud’s bathtub boat</p><p>on a pond in Tuileries Gardens. Some labor</p><p>growing pains on death-row’s dry concrete.</p><p>In suburbia most land on fertile ground.</p><p>Even the run-amucks multiply in manicured cracks.</p><p>Rivera’s describing dandelions seeding into air in “Manicured Cracks” how most</p><p>won’t make it that the seeds of the weed the most iconic of spring youth images</p><p>faces a fate like all of us. They might live on to flower again or they won’t. As human</p><p>counterparts many of us will die along the way and often the worst of us the</p><p>weeds thrive. What I like is the music in Rivera’s poems. The alliterative urge the</p><p>hard consonant sounds very much like later Seamus Heaney acting like sharp</p><p>edges to confine and crib the lines and feet.</p><p>Poetry and art are created by privilege and these poems are unabashed at their</p><p>modernist raiment made possible by a privileged life. Paris is both the geographical</p><p>and figurative heart of the book. Paris the literal city and Paris the epitome of cul-</p><p>ture. Rivera is at home on both fronts and relies on music to drive his poetry for-</p><p>ward; the imagery well that’s extra sauce for the pudding and whether he’s</p><p>referring to the city of lights to art in a gallery or to ancient Occidental poem it</p><p>doesn’t matter. For Rivera their origins are the same. The urge to create to be re-</p><p>born.</p>