Every Sound is Not a Wolf

Alberto Ríos’s Every Sound is Not a Wolf evokes and awakens the senses—the smell of herbs, “the geckos at their mysterious work.” Even silence grows loud and expansive in its stillness. Told entirely in couplets, and with remarkable lucidity, Ríos balances the harmonies and disharmonies found throughout all of existence—between people and the natural world, between life and death, between spirit and body, between borders real and imagined. What does it mean for a body to house two languages? And what is an imaginary line between countries? From backyard to Sonoran desert, from mining town to river, this collection journeys the human experience, through grief and joy, tuned to the “small buzzing of a live world.” Ríos asks us to feel the connective electric pulse between all things, to find newness, musicality, and beauty in the mundane. That the world keeps moving forward, this is miracle enough.