The Shallow End of Sleep

José Antonio Rodríguez’s poetry is one of memory, both private and public. It is grounded in storytelling and lyricism that reveal a speaker’s developing awareness as he traverses borders of nation, language, class, and sexuality. The poems move back and forth between a home left behind on the south side of the Rio Grande and a new home on the north side. Both awe-struck by and apprehensive of the world around him, the speaker searches for a way to claim a new space, a place of belonging. Through these poems, both lyrical and narrative, tender and tense, familiar and estranging, the poet invites us to examine the very concept of home—how we define it, what constitutes it, the ways it can be destabilized and how, in the most trying times, we must learn to sustain the hope of it in our hearts.