Emmy Perez's poetry collection With the River on Our Face flows through the Southwest and the Texas borderlands to the river's mouth in the Rio Grande Valley/El Valle. The poems celebrate the land, communities, and ecology of the borderlands through lyric and narrative utterances, auditory and visual texture, chant, and litany that merge and diverge like the iconic river in this long-awaited collection.

Perez reveals the strengths and nuances of a universe where no word is "foreign." Her fast-moving, evocative words illuminate the prayers, gasps, touches, and gritos born of...