Loss in Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s “Arriving at the Heart of Tragedy” and Alberto Ríos’s “Taking Away the Name of a Nephew”

Abstract

Alberto Ríos’s “Taking Away the Name of a Nephew” documents the traumatic loss felt by a woman who reads a newspaper article about “one of the disappeared” and assumes that the account of the dead body found refers to her nephew. At that moment, she becomes an unwitting witness to the pain of others. Through her reading of a newspaper account of someone’s death, the aunt makes the reader aware of her nephew’s pain and her own pain when she imagines the horror of his death. Benjamin Alire Sáenz, likewise, focuses on loss and trauma in “Arriving at the Heart of Tragedy” as he examines different events to determine what constitutes tragedy. He concludes that the death of a child left unattended in a parked car constitutes tragedy as does sacrificing one’s life to one’s values, as Lot’s Wife does when she refuses to obey God’s command to leave her land and family. These two poems document the violence or simple random events that affect people.