Böcker av Gabriel Gomez

This is an autobiography of my father, Julio Gomez, who grew up in the rough streets of East Los Angeles, in a much different world than what we have come to know today. He had emptied his soul in his last will and testament before taking his own life on his fifty-eighth birthday and emailed me this book before he went. My brother and I are his legacy, and this is his legend.

The Outer Bands is a first collection of poems from Andres Montoya prize-winner Gabriel Gomez. The book is an expansive examination of language and landscape, voice and memory, where the balance between experimentation and tradition coexist. The poems realize a reconciliation between the writer's voice and the voice of witness, wonder, and tragedy; a dialogue between two worlds that employs an equally paradoxical imagery of the American Southwest and the marshes of Southern Louisiana. The book concludes with its namesake poem, "e;The Outer Bands,"e; a twenty-eight-day chronicle of the days between Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, which together decimated the Gulf Coast region in 2005. The sequence poem, a pastiche and re-contextualization of images, news blurbs, and political rhetoric, travels and responds in a spare subjectivity to the storm. Gabriel Gomez completed it during a two-month emergency residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute after his home in New Orleans was destroyed.