“A phrase from Comte de Lautréamont’s prose poem Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) has been used by many as a definition of surrealism: ‘the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.’ Such fanciful and bizarre juxtaposition is one of the many sources of beauty and the sublime in The Connoisseur of Alleys. Sentences and lines resurrected from the earlier works resonate and reverberate with each other in a preordained fashion so that each poem ebbs and flows, builds to a crescendo, echoing each of the other poems’ ebbs, flows, and crescendos. There is certainly ‘chance meeting’ in the way Tabios’s text collides with itself but there is nothing chance about the delicacy and beauty that comes from those collisions.”—Vince Gotera