Rios is one of the more widely represented poets on the small press scene today. Like Gary Soto or Ray Gonzalez, his roots are Mexican-American, and at his best the poems reflect that tradition. Working with the quasi-mythical topics of his ethnic background, as he does in ``The Sword Eusebio Montero Swallowed,'' Rios demonstrates a capacity for powerfully extending a metaphor. But for the most part these poems fall into the slender-line, work shop-oriented poetry that insists on an anecdotal, narrative, and representational axis, with results that can be embarassing: ``I can only pretend/ I am a woman.'' One regrets the absence of an informed sense of poetic tradition, not just in Rios, but in so many poets writing today.-- Ivan Arguelles, Univ. of California at Berkeley Lib.
