Rigoberto Gonzalez writes for the missing, the dead, the mourning, the lost and about unspeakable loss. He give s voice to the voiceless, wives without husbands, sons without fathers. The poetry is beautiful in many places. Modern Central American interweaves with the mythical Aztec realm of th dead. Language warps to fit the damage and destruction. Whole villages are ghost towns filled with memory.

So much poetry today is topicless solipsism. Unpeopled Eden studies murder, the drug trade, and the destructive effects of emigration to North American in oblique but vivid ways. Gonzalez's collection forces us to see hard realities without ever becoming polemical. ( )