R Rodriguez: 57 books

From the Banks of Brook Avenue offers a humorous, ironic, passionate, and vivid exploration of the cityscape. It was awarded First Prize for Poetry in the North Street Book Prize, a competition for self-published books which is sponsored by Winning Writers. Subways, bridges, streets, public...

W R Rodriguez explores the beauty, wonder, and harsh reality of the urban environment. He has a strong poetic voice that uses irony and humor. He treats his subjects in a variety of styles: narratives, lyrics, long poems, and prose poems. Vivid and abundant imagery abound; the reader will get a sense...

This guide is designed to help teachers use The Shoe Shine Parlor Poems et al as a classroom text. W. R. Rodriguez, who is a poet and teacher, offers an author's introduction, a vocabulary list, and several pre-reading and post-reading questions and activities for each poem.

Have you wondered goes into the creation and evolution of a poem? Every poem has a backstory, and in this book the author willingly shares it. This Annotated Edition includes all forty poems of From the Banks of Brook Avenue. After each, the author discusses the people, places, and events that inspired...

Three memoirs about The Bronx from 1922-2013. A compilation of articles written for The Bronx County Historical Society Journal.

In this short story a private investigator is hired to find out who “killed” and old servant bot by smashing his head with a pipe. He takes the case just to tie him over the dearth of his usual customers, suspicious people looking for dirt on their cheating spouses. His snooping leads to the conclusion...

In this short story a young man is the accidental witness to a rape, unknown to perpetrators and victim. The young man flees and needs to figure out where he stands but his moral compass has to be re-calibrated. The resetting of his true north happens on an unexpected way.

First published in 1994, this was my first story ever written and first published, all that in the same month. Man, I said to myself, this writing thing is a piece of cake. Of course, beginner's luck doesn't last long and while I got to see more of my stories published during the years to follow,...

These narrative and lyric poems derive from the author's youth in the South Bronx and his work as a bootblack in the family shoe shine parlor during the 1960s.The first section, “the shoe shine parlor poems,” contains narratives and character sketches of neighborhood personalities:...

Three books of poetry inspired by The Bronx. The entire text of: "the shoe shine parlor poems et al," "concrete pastures of the beautiful bronx," and "from the banks of brook avenue."

Unhappiness can be self inflicted when we fail to appreciate what we have or get sidetracked by worries that are not worth our time. In this short story, a young boy who is poor but doesn't know it, who is happy with his simple life, has that life tarnished by worries that, while look to him insurmountable, are small peanuts. Death and a missing love one reset the boy's priorities in life.

An Internet porn obsession drives a common family man into divorce, the horrors of incest, and a life he had not planned for. Exiled from his former world he escapes into oblivion until years later the daughter he had abused tracks him down. The young woman has her own addictions and troubles. Father, daughter and a revolver meet and destinies change.

I've seen hellish things. I've had terrible acts committed within my walls by equally terrible people. I am in anguish. I am tormented. The ghosts of the long dead walk my floors. They fill me with dread and fear. I can't protest. If only I could be free. If only these walls could scream...I could let the world know of my never ending horror...

A short story about BMX racing and the odd relationship of sorts between and old guy and a punk kid. Winner of Dirt Rag Magazine's 2010 Literature contest.