Some books are written to be published. Others are written to be given. This one belongs to the second category — and that is precisely what makes it extraordinary.
Through All the Little Holes You Cannot See is a collection of 58 poems born from an impossible question: how does a father say “I love you” to a son who speaks the language of the universe? Marcelo Rioja’s answer is to learn that language. Not in formulas — in words and love.
The result is a book without precedent in contemporary poetry. Not because no one has used scientific language in poetry before — they have, and brilliantly. But because here, science is not decorative metaphor or intellectual display. It is the native language of love. The cardioids, the eigenvalues, the entropy, the fundamental forces, the Rose of Venus — all of it exists because Leonardo exists. Physics is the bridge between two worlds that love each other without always being able to touch.
The book has an architecture that reveals itself gradually. The poems do not repeat — each one finds a new way to say the same thing. And yet all of them speak from the same center, like the concentric circles of the wave labyrinth, like the Fourier epicycles that when summed draw a heart. The singularity collapses into a point. Entropy orders chaos. The cardioid always returns to the beginning. The book does the same.
There are moments of scientific beauty that disarms: “equations that derive me but do not integrate me into a foreign world.” There are moments of tenderness that strike without warning: “With him, I have everything” — Leo at five years old, choosing his father over oxygen on an imaginary trip to the Moon. There are moments of brutal honesty: “I am as noble as you, though ethereal. My reactions are merely atmosphere, without transformation.” A father who examines himself with the same chemical precision with which he examines his son.
But the book is not only the story of a father and a son. It is the story of a man who learned to watch without interrupting — standing in a doorframe, sitting eight hours by the roadside observing ants, anchored on the moon renouncing his own spin so as not to miss a single detail. It is the story of a faith that returned, of a wife who brought that faith back with her, of a journey to the end of the world with two sons embracing a 2,700‑year‑old larch. It is the story of a 2026 that hurts and yet produces poems that end looking forward.
The translation into English — made by the author himself — deserves special mention. Translating one’s own poetry is one of the most difficult exercises that exists, because it demands fidelity not to the words but to the voice. Rioja achieves this with surprising naturalness. The English does not sound like a translation — it sounds like a second language in which the same heart beats with equal precision.
The book closes with a rhetorical question — where will the poems remain if not in the heart of those I love? — written in a public library in Austin, with Leonardo and Alejandro sitting nearby. The answer is on every preceding page. And in the words of a three‑year‑old boy who described empty atomic space as love, and with that phrase made the universe become re‑infinite from that very instant.
Through All the Little Holes You Cannot See is a book that stays with you. Not because it is erudite, though it is. Not because it is moving, though it is that too. But because it is true — that rare truth that only appears when someone writes without thinking of the reader, but of a single person. And that person, reading it, will know they were loved with all the precision of the universe.
