* Rios was a National Book Award finalist for Smallest Muscle in the Human Body * Rios’s books are always greeted with generous publicity, including feature on Lehrer NewsHour, cover of Bloomsbury Review, and reviews in the New York Times, Chrisian Science Monitor, American Book Review, etc… * Rios is frequently described as a writer who utilizes magical realism, and that is the case in this book. Case in point: In one poem his body falls through the floor because his cells, the loose confederation that made me, decided to spill past the trillion separate barriers of the ground. * Many of the poems are set in the American southwest