Suggest Paradise
Poems
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2024 Kempner Family Book Prize for Poetry given by the Philosophical Society of Texas
Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, Ray Gonzalez returns to Texas and nearby New Mexico to meditate on love, literature, loss, and la línea in Suggest Paradise. The collection offers readers some of the richest and most complex poems that embody the Southwest and the borderlands, including a poignant look at the massacre at the El Paso Walmart. A unique voice of the Southwest, Gonzalez brings his intellect and his well-honed craft to this work and offers readers a nuanced and powerful perspective on poetry and the Border.
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Gonzalez (Feel Puma) interrogates history, modern society, grief, and migration in his nuanced latest. "I am here," he writes, "and I want to listen." These poems are a testament to such listening, which allows for recognition of "the river will outlast your// lifting hands." Gonzalez juxtaposes ordinary lives with moments in history and stellar, imaginative descriptions of surrounding nature that witnesses human activity. The poems are rich with tender, near-magical moments: "the honeysuckle dripping/ the same water as the sea," and, in snowy scene, a body frozen "in a profile that allows for grace." In a poem about a mass-shooting at the El Paso, Tex., Walmart, Gonzalez recognizes "a Chicago man who devotes his life/ to making wooden crosses for mass-/ killing victims all over the country." Applied to the ruins and painful realities of modern society, Gonzalez's poetic eye offers a transcendent vision that is both fine-tuned to the particular and aware of the universal. These are graceful, powerful poems.
