Shadowboxing: Poems and Impersonations

"Shadowboxing: Poems and Impersonations is the most original, charged, exciting debut I have read in years. Joseph Rios redefines fearlessness with a signature talent and unapologetic conviction. The agile flurry of his storytelling is dazzling: Zapata and Lorca, Shakespeare and Borges, Rocky Balboa, family and Tias, and the brown bodies of East Oakland and West Fresno are all part of this dance, this poetry as shadowboxing. This is duende and fire, language as pugilism. This is a new poetics at the next level, part theater, full urgency, fist-waving resistance, memory and homage, with so much vitality and velocity these poems tremor and shake. Trust when the poet writes, “I reach for the dial and discover I can bend the moonlight.” Rios is ahead of the curve. This book is simply brilliant and unforgettable." —Lee Herrick

Borrowing the poetic language found in boxing lore and in the Rocky films, Shadowboxing pieces together a poetic portrait of Josefo, a Chicano adolescent working and becoming a poet in the farm territories of Central California. Rios confounds the relationship between author, speaker, and subject within various forms and, at times, across genre. He employs the lyric, the epistle, the dialogue, and various impersonations to challenge the boundaries of what we call poetry or theater and our understanding of high and low culture. He challenges the usefulness of poetry and stands upon oral histories to demystify California’s overlooked labor class. Rios invites the reader to enter Josefo’s world of memory, experience, and talk. It is a world of packinghouse mentors, storytelling grandmothers, parable sharing plumbers, smooth talking truck drivers, and infinitely patient literature professors.