Like his first book, Washing Rice & Other Poems (under pen name, Juan Alcala Luna), Crossing the River from Remembering to Forgetting involves itself with exile and loneliness, reflective of the race that continues diaspora to every place on earth. In a way, the poet's (a Bay Area resident since 1984) voice is relevant since his poems are utterances that originates from clearly mapped sites, i.e. Naga City, Manila, San Francisco. In a way, this book is 'figures of the mirror by which the reflective and haunting functions of poetry are not merely reiterations of the self but revelatory sites of deformation.