Boyer Rickel’s arreboles charts the small but inexhaustible moments of experience, moments when the world in its completeness can be missed… or found, as he finds it in the 'chauk, chauk' of his lover’s spade that works the flower bed in his Tucson garden. Rickel's book is wonderfully quiet and moving.

[Rickel] is attracted to the more transcendental impulses of the lyric, seeking a kind of grace that is, if not ecstatic, then at least transformative… Though its accumulation is admirably underspoken, even surprising, the sense of loss in this book is large and moving. By the final "Poem to Begin the Second Decade of AIDS," Rickel has not transcended but rather transported himself from a time when "The world was one block long" ("Two Childhood Songs") to be able, now, to compose a poem that “will make certain/ close friends blush, who prefer poems be/ like linens they can put in drawers,/ sure of their place and use.".