Rivera's poetry is tautly disciplined, passionate, and virile. He can get the Holocaust, Icarus, a Frost allusion, and "I" into the confines of a sonnet without strain--and without the reader even realizing it IS a sonnet. The author's long life-experience, including his travels and his career as a scientist, inform Rivera's poetry, which can perhaps be described by these words from one of the poems: ..".just rhymes/ Assemblages of seductions... Other premeditated crimes."