cover image The Drunkards

The Drunkards

L.M. Rivera. Omnidawn, $17.95 trade paper (144p) ISBN 978-1-63243-054-0

Rivera distills a poetics of dialogue and conversation in his innovative and thought-provoking debut, a collagelike text richly layered with the remnants of literary history. It emerges from a tapestry of influences and predecessors, evoking Marianne Moore’s treatises on poetry as a curatorial act. Topography, Rivera writes, is “the place from which all points extend outward toward rupturing lights.” This passage, characteristic of Rivera’s self-reflexive meditations, considers its own movement through a cultural landscape filled with, as he quotes Jean-Luc Nancy saying, “excess, debauchery, distraction, and euphoria.” The work’s hybridity suggests that responses to art can take many forms that do not always follow the strict, limiting conventions of scholarly exegesis. Rivera cautions readers against “those that domestically wait—signaling out to gather tragedy—disgracing minor observations—fearing the heightened sum.” This, too, operates as ars poetica, as a self-conscious commentary on the work’s place in the fixed stillness of the canon. What’s more, Rivera underscores the necessity of revising and expanding common thinking about genre, to make possible more than just minor observations in a formalized scholarly setting. Rivera’s superbly realized interpretive work allows readers to inhabit language in a way that is more inclusive, more just, and more mindful. (Apr.)