Beautiful Wall

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY DEC 7, 2015

Gonzalez (Cool Auditor) has established himself as a writer of place, specifically the American Southwest. His latest collection emphasizes the mutability of the region and of the very idea of home. Meditative poems sift through the desert's pluralistic cultures and traditions, thoroughly and radically resisting any simplistic division in the manner of the U.S.-Mexican border of the land, its history, and its people. Looking from El Paso across to Juarez, after considering the vista as home to the violence of present-day border crossings, the drug war, WWII-era atomic bomb testing, and 17th-century trade routes, Gonzalez instructs, "Make the sign of the cross, open your eye to one town,/ two cities, five centuries of praying in the beautiful dust." Even in poems that do not directly engage with the border, landscape becomes a palimpsest where no single narrative reigns. A number of poems focus on other writers, artists, and musicians, particularly the American tradition of writers who go west. Though distinct, these tributes resonate with Gonzalez's poetry of place, offering intimate engagements with subject matter that has meant many things to many different people at many different points in time. Such layered dynamics are central in Gonzalez's poetics, where "the riches of the city echo,/ like treason minus desire."