Portal of Dreams

Andres Rodriguez is the author of Night Song (Tia Chucha Press), Book of the Heart (Lindisfarne Press), and Portal of Dreams (Woodley Press). His poems have appeared in Bilingual Review, Cortland Review, Harvard Review, Hubbub, New York Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and several anthologies including Currents from the Dancing River (Harcourt Brace) and Wild Song (University of Georgia Press). In 2007 he won Poets & Writers' Maureen Egan Award for Poetry. He lives and works in Kansas City. It hurt to face such ordinary brightness, such casual daytime splendor, because I see the end in all things no matter how hard I try to seine beauty's brief sight. And here I am again trying to live into what I see. "Poet Andres Rodriguez's wonderful new book is a "sorcery of falling." With imagery both fierce and exquisite, these poems take the reader on a plummeting and soaring journey through the lives of the fallen and the trampled, and the ardent struggle to veer upward again into flight." Charlotte Zoe Walker, author of Condor and Hummingbird, My Irish Grandmothers, and editor of The Art of Seeing Things "Portal of Dreams crackles with life, mourns death, and senses the essence of human connections. In his finely shaped poems, Andres Rodriguez travels from the city and its "crust of shattered nights" through desert revelations and on into deep history's "crowded tomb" and cruelties. He channels lost and wounded voices and communes with demons and dreams. This is just what you want in a book of poems: surprise and revelation on every page." - Steve Paul, author of Hemingway at Eighteen and editor of Kansas City Nair