The Concrete River

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