SKU: 66871468156

There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven: Stories

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There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven: StoriesLonglisted for the PEN Faulkner Award Finalist for The Story Prize Finalist for the Ferro Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction Finalist for the California Book Award Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the New American Voices Award "Ruben Reyes Jr. is a wonder." Hctor Tobar An electrifying debut story collection about Central American identity that spans past, present, and future worlds to reveal what

Longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award - Finalist for The Story Prize - Finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction - Finalist for the California Book Award - Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the New American Voices Award

"Ruben Reyes Jr. is a wonder." -- Héctor Tobar

An electrifying debut story collection about Central American identity that spans past, present, and future worlds to reveal what happens when your life is no longer your own.

An ordinary man wakes one morning to discover he's a famous reggaetón star. An aging abuela slowly morphs into a marionette puppet. A struggling academic discovers the horrifying cost of becoming a Self-Made Man.

In There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, Ruben Reyes Jr. conjures strange dreamlike worlds to explore what we would do if we woke up one morning and our lives were unrecognizable. Boundaries between the past, present, and future are blurred. Menacing technology and unchecked bureaucracy cut through everyday life with uncanny dread. The characters, from mango farmers to popstars to ex-guerilla fighters to cyborgs, are forced to make uncomfortable choices--choices that not only mean life or death, but might also allow them to be heard in a world set on silencing the voices of Central Americans.

Blazing with heart, humor, and inimitable style, There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven subverts everything we think we know about migration and its consequences, capturing what it means to take up a new life--whether willfully or forced--with piercing and brilliant clarity. A gifted new storyteller and trailblazing stylist, Reyes not only transports to other worlds but alerts us to the heartache and injustice of our own.



Author: Ruben Reyes Jr
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 07/01/2025
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.31w x 0.54d
ISBN: 9780063336308

About the Author
Reyes Jr, Ruben: -

Ruben Reyes Jr. is the son of two Salvadoran immigrants and the author of There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Harvard College, his writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. Originally from Southern California, he now lives in Brooklyn.

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SKU: 66871468156

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4.2 ★★★★★
Based on 18 reviews
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Verified Purchase
L. Moyse
West Palm Beach, US
★★★★★ 5
A fine performance
Format: Paperback
You see an old pocket knife on the cover, maybe a Case; it may have even belonged to Jesse Graves, but he has certainly used it in sculpting his poetry. "Tennessee Landscape" is pure plain speech, and all the more evocative for it. Graves uses language not to shock, not incite and not to transgress; he uses it to bring home simple and time worn truths that never go away. In the poem that is the book's title, Graves recounts his family history and ends telling us "The dead move through us at their will, their voices chime/just beyond our hearing...alone in the field, and never alone." He pays homage to a farming tool"(Elegy for a Hay Rake), not with a tone of jaundiced cynicism, speaking to it instead in a voice filled with thanks and appreciation, as if the hay rake, too,knew how worthwhile its job had been. The second part of the volume expands Graves' geography from East Tennessee to New Orleans, North Carolina, points beyond, and the cast of subjects becomes a little broader as well, but the language remains firm and precise. "The Night Cafe: North Rendon, New Orleans": diction so perfect I feel I was there that night too. "My Sister at Sea": likely my favorite here. It feels personal, a short glimpse into a private heart; the glimpse is snatched away in a hurry but not before Graves tells us "...wishing I could bring/ you to this shore...Make your illness a small boat we could burn/Sailing out in ashes on the current." Whether it is a landscape, a hay rake, a bar or a loved one, Jesse Graves is a poet of things that last, one who writes quiet confessions with confidence in a spare quiet and sure voice. Very highly recommend this book.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2013
T
Thomas A. Holmes
Carnegie, US
★★★★★ 5
Fine Contemporary Poetry--Just Happens to Be Appalachian
Format: Paperback
The poems in Jesse Graves' TENNESSEE LANDSCAPE WITH BLIGHTED PINE express an indebtedness to a way of life that we contemporary Appalachians have watched transform at an accelerated pace over the past few decades, as we see the beloved old ways of our culture adapt to the demands of a society marked with the pervasiveness of media, the incursion of corporate demands, and the poignant recognition that as much as family prepares us to face the world outside our community, the impact of that world can blur the impressions our homes have made on us. Graves' work approaches these themes from various directions, as a son looking to the legacy of his family, as a youth and young man balancing education--both formal and that gleaned from personal experience--and as a family man weighing what he shares and offers in embodying those values. In this consistently fine volume, it is difficult to select favorites, but there are "River Gods," where an inebriated student and his companion cross the high railway trestle over the Tennessee River in Knoxville, Tennessee, "Deep Corner," where the speaker contemplates how his life has turned out differently than his brother's, "Mother's Milk," where the speaker weighs how much his mother has contributed to his life (including, sweetly, "an ear for slightly off-pitch singing"), and "Digging the Pond," where the speaker and his father silently acknowledge that the son will not preserve all his father's values: . . . I stood off to the side too often to learn what he was born knowing. The doing and the undoing. I can find in his face what he reads about the future in the tea-colored water, his eyes and mine trying to avoid it. Graves' love for these gifts, those accepted and those only acknowledged, resonates throughout TENNESSEE LANDSCAPE WITH BLIGHTED PINE. Graves' appreciation for lyric poetry, his talent for finding the expressiveness of everyday language, and his offering scenes with great depth of meaning and feeling make this collection memorable, worthy of high recommendation.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2011
J
jwriter
Phoenix, US
★★★★★ 5
Extraordinary Journey
Format: Paperback
Jesse Graves conducts the reader on an intimate journey from childhood to manhood. Rooted deep in the rich red clay of East Tennessee, the narrative provides fresh insights about the ties of land and family. "Johnson's Ground" describes an annual homecoming at the family cemetery: "they never let us go, even the ones/Laid under before our births continue to make their claims." The poems express both nostalgia for the past as well as forward-looking hopes for a fresh life in the future. Daughter, Chloe often becomes a bridge from present to past as in "Water Washing Away": "A fair price for the vision of a girl/ who has warped the ancient spell of time,/ who has turned back my eyes." Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine is an enchanting read for poet and non-poet alike.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2013
A
Verified Purchase
Austin Duck
Cuba, US
★★★★★ 1
Go Read Art Smith or Charles Wright
Format: Paperback
This book is clearly the case of someone steeped in a lyric tradition, but, rather than engaging in the self-reflexive structure of the tradition, is interested in describing ad nauseum, his southern experience. While there are moments in the book that tend toward the sublime, it rests largely as self-indulgent in a way antithetical to the form it chooses.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2013
A
Angels Among Us
Chelsea, US
★★★★★ 5
Dr. G.
Format: Paperback
Jesse Graves (a.k.a. "Dr. G.") is one of my professors at East Tennessee State University. Not only is he a great teacher, he is a very talented poet. I would recommend his work to anyone! Anyone that does not like his work probably just failed his class. :p
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Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2014

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