A poem is a living library, a hospitable planet in black space, a bell waiting to wear the music of motion across stilled lands. Writers are the carriers of the voices around us. We are writers and readers in dark times when words are correctly understood as powerful weapons. aFrom the Introduction Reading Rane Arroyoas poems is a little like watching a movie playing at fastforward speed on the TV in your darkened bedroom. The colors pop and snap, the images leap and recede, the colors seem brighter than lifeaand you canat stop watching even long enough to blink. Itas an intimate experience. Even at hyperspeed you can make out the images of friends, family, and lovers (especially lovers) burning rubber across the unblinking screen. And even without a sound track, you can hear the musicaa symphony of jazz and samba, salsa and street sounds. In The Buried Sea, Arroyo has selected poems from his first eleven booksafive full-length collections of poems and six chapbooksaand has added nineteen new poems. When asked to describe himself, Arroyo writes that athe answer is easy: Iam a Puerto Rican, gay, Midwestern, educated, former working class, liberal, atheistic, humanist, American, male, ex-Mormon, ex-Catholic, pseudo-Buddhist, teacher, reader, global, and popular cultureainformed poet.a Readers will find traces of all of these selves in this collection. And Arroyo does make it aeasya to follow the clues. His poemsavivacious, sexy, shiny, sly, pointed, ambitiousaare easy to approach and easy to love. But they come with strings attachedalike all affairs of the heartaand therein lies so much of their pleasure.