A mesmerizing collection of poems of urban pain and immigrant alienation, humming with a current of genuine beauty and the pulse of life The Concrete River’s poems are dispatches from city corners that CNN viewers never see, that few dare visit, and that fewer still manage to escape. Rodríguez sings corridos of barrios and busted Chicanos trying to make it in L.A. and Chicago, from ballads of Watts’s broken glass to blues played alongside a tequila bottle under an elevated train. But the music also captures moments of true beauty amid the hard urban surfaces, where the cries of the ’hood “deliver sacrifices / of sound and flesh, / as a mother’s milk flows,” while love and community offer renewed hope. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Luis J. Rodríguez including rare images from the author’s personal collection.
