The SF Site Featured Review: The Roswell Poems

The Roswell Poems

Rane Arroyo

Wordfarm, 71 pages

Rane Arroyo
Rane Arroyo (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh) began his writing career as a performance artist. He is also a playwright, fiction writer and poet. He teaches creative writing at the University of Toledo and serves on the Board of Directors for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP). Arroyo's work has earned several awards, including the John Ciardi Poetry Prize, the Carl Sandburg Poetry Prize, an Ohio Arts Council Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Pushcart Prize and the Hart Crane Poetry Prize.

Rane Arroyo Website
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A review by David Maddox

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No event in conspiracy history has ever topped Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Whether you believe an alien space ship crashed, it was just a weather balloon, if the government covered it up or if it was just theories that have grown over the decades, the Roswell crash is part of our cultural consciousness.

Rane Arroyo collects together a multitude of poems that chronicle the history of the events in stanzas and simple words. Although it is listed as a work of fiction in the Introduction, there is a definite X-Files "I Want to Believe" element through the works. Beginning with cowboy Mac Brazel's initial discovery of something in the desert, to government officials and soldiers following blind orders, even Hopi Indian remembrances of the land, the poems work on many levels.

Initially, the works are an easy read. But several of the poems have such haunting wording that they stick with the reader who will find themselves drawn back to re-read and have the stark imagery of the desert and the shiny unknown metals dance in their minds. Separately, each poem is an interesting work, but by bringing them together, a rather beautiful story is told.

The story may be old, and many interpretations have come from it. We may never know what really happened out there under the hot sun of the New Mexican desert, but if it can inspire such theories, such dreams and such imagination, than maybe it's best left to the dreamers to recount it for us, which is what The Roswell Poems does, quite beautifully.

Science fiction enthusiast David Maddox has been many things, including Star Trek characters and the Riddler in a Batman stunt show. He holds a degree in Cinema from San Francisco State University, and has written several articles for various SF sites as well as the Star Wars Insider and the Star Trek Communicator. He spends his time working on screenplays and stories while acting on stage, screen and television. He can sometimes be seen giving tours at Universal Studios Hollywood and occasionally playing Norman Bates. Really.