Poetry Books
Collections of poetry that weave together language, image, and cultural memory — giving voice to the borderlands of experience, identity, and belonging.
If Peace Could Only Come
Dr. Rivera's fourth book of poems turns its attention to Ukraine, bearing witness to lives upended by war. He calls these "empathy poems" — written from the viewpoint of civilians and soldiers living inside the violence. As he has described it, it is as if the victims of war were speaking through his voice. The collection is an act of imaginative solidarity, insisting on the shared humanity of people in crisis far from home.
The book joins a larger arc of Rivera's poetry that moves from personal love to geopolitical grief — from Valentine's Day verses to the walls of Palestine to the ruins of Ukrainian cities — always asking what it means to care across distance.
Poet in Palestine
Written in the tradition of Federico García Lorca's Poet in New York, this collection grew from Dr. Rivera's many visits to Palestine — to Bethlehem in particular. The poems express what he saw, felt, and encountered as a foreigner moving through a land defined by occupation and the omnipresent Separation Wall. Rather than abstract politics, they give voice to Palestinians as fellow human beings: neighbors, friends, fellow artists.
The collection also records a spiritual awakening — Rivera's deepening relationship with faith, place, and the sacred, awakened by repeated encounters with the land described in scripture and shadowed by contemporary conflict.
Valentine Poems
Written during the COVID-19 pandemic, these poems began as Valentine's Day gifts for Rivera's wife, Aileen — accumulated across many years of marriage. The collection grew from the intimate into something universal: a meditation on love as the apex of the human social bond, the force that pulls us together when the world forces us apart.
Rivera writes that love transcends all boundaries. It is an energy that leaves a shadow of itself long after we have passed. In a time of enforced isolation, these poems insist on connection.
The Bones of My Brother & Other Poems
Dr. Rivera's second full-length collection, exploring grief, memory, brotherhood, and the body's relationship to history. In poems drawn from personal experience and from the communities he has moved through as a curator and educator, Rivera traces the weight of loss — private and collective — with the directness and lyric compression that characterizes his poetic voice.
