Böcker av Ray Gonzalez

Set in the desert Southwest, Beautiful Wall straddles current realities of immigration and border violence, and a beautiful, familial past.

Ray Gonzalez traces his love of reading, philosophy, and learning with poems constantly in conversation - with each other, with texts by other writers and the writers themselves, with world history and his personal history and people he has encountered.

A masterful collaboration between photographer Bruce Berman and poets Ray Gonzalez and Lawrence Welsh, Cutting the Wire offers us a way to look again, to really look, at the border between Mexico and the United States.

As we approach the new century, Latino poetry is in the midst of its most vital and productive period. Poetry by Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans has changed the course of contemporary American writing forever.  And it has done this by emphasizing poetry as the sound of everyday life--showing readers and other writers that the most effective manner of preserving the traditions of a culture comes from the colorful language of daily experience.Touching the Fire recognizes the excitement of this movement by focusing on a few of its major poets, presenting a substantial portion of each poet''s work.  Some of these poets--Martin Espada, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Victor Hernandez Vruz, for example--have been writing and publishing a long time.  Some are only starting their careers.  But they were all chosen because they best represent the strongest elements of modern Latino poetry--a confidence of language in its many forms, a gift for shattering emotional honesty, and an ear for the rhythms of a vibrant culture.Featuring the poetry of:Sandra M. CastilloLorna Dee CervantesJudith Ortiz CoferVictor Hernandez CruzSilvia CurbeloJuan DelgadoMartin EspadaDiana GarciaRichard GarciaRay GonzalezMaurice Kilwein GuevaraJuan Felipe HerreraDionisio D. MartinezValerie MartinezGloria Vando

"A man doesn't sleep with the moon. He sleeps with his hunger, gathers bowls of avocados and wipes his lips with his sins." The Religion of Hands does not foster sleep. Look quickly and you will catch the hint of a fox streaking in front of your car's headlights at night. Look more carefully out your bedroom window and you may see your life going, by lost loved ones waving hello. "Who were you when the stars were misinterpreted as the fingertips of God?" Ray Gonzalez blends symbolic play with lyrical beauty as he works from a vast and complex palette to infuse popular culture with myth. The Religion of Hands is imbued with magic realism: a suffocating dream of tamales, mysterious reptilian allusions, a man who "finds God walking down the stairs to hand him an old, tattered phonebook from the year he was born." It offers strange prophecies: "A steady vegetation will grow across the empire as more homeboys are killed in drive-bys...Microscopic scratches on an old vinyl record will form a message discovered in twenty more years when the album is bought at a garage sale." And in 14 flash fictions, it tells of a tiny old man kept in a glass jar, an accordion stored in an old family trunk, tales of sharks and bandits. The religion of hands has its own unspoken sacraments. "The fingers take over, teaching whoever holds the moment that the rapid weight of the open hands is a dangerous way to live." Seamlessly, effortlessly, multi-dexterously, Ray Gonzalez spins words that speak our very dreams.

Returning home after a long absence is not always easy. For Ray Gonzalez, it is more than a visit; it is a journey to the underground heart. He has lived in other parts of the country for more than twenty years, but this award-winning poet now returns to the desert Southwest--a native son playing tourist--in order to unearth the hidden landscapes of family and race. As Gonzalez drives the highways of New Mexico and west Texas, he shows us a border culture rejuvenated by tourist and trade dollars, one that will surprise readers for whom the border means only illegal immigration, NAFTA, and the drug trade. Played out against a soundtrack of the Allman Brothers and The Doors, "The Underground Heart" takes readers on a trip through a seemingly barren landscape that teems with life and stories. Gonzalez witnesses Minnesotans experiencing culture shock while attending a college football game in El Paso; he finds a proliferation of Pancho Villa death masks housed at different museums; he revisits Carlsbad Caverns, discovering unsuspected beauty beneath the desert's desolation; and he takes us shopping at El Mercado--where tourists can buy everything from black velvet paintings of Elvis (or Jesus, or JFK) to Mexican flag underwear. From "nuclear tourism" in New Mexico to "heritage tourism" in the restored missions of San Antonio, Gonzalez goes behind the slogans of The Land of Enchantment and The Lone Star State to uncover a totally different Southwest. Here are tourist centers that give a distorted view of southwestern life to outsiders, who leave their dollars in museum gift shops and go home weighed down with pounds of Indian jewelry around their necks. Here border history is the story ofone culture overlaid on another, re-forming itself into a whole new civilization on the banks of the Rio Grande. "The Underground Heart" is a book brimming with subtle ironies and insights both quiet and complex--one which recognizes that sometimes one must go away and grow older to finally recognize home as a life-giving, spiritually sustaining place. As Gonzalez rediscovers the land of his past, he comes to understand the hyper, bilingual atmosphere of its future. And in the Southwest he describes, readers may catch a glimpse of their own hidden landscapes of home.

For poet Ray Gonzalez, growing up in El Paso during the 1960s was a time of loneliness and vulnerability. He encountered discrimination in high school not only for being Latino but also for being a non-athlete in a school where sports were important. Like many young people, he found diversion in music; unlike most, he found solace in the desert. In these vignettes, Gonzalez shares memories of boyhood that tell how he discovered the natural world and his creative spirit. Through 29 storylike essays, he takes readers into the heart of the desert and the soul of a developing poet. Gonzalez introduces us to the people who shaped his life. We learn of his father's difficulties with running a pool hall and of his grandmother's steadfast religious faith. We meet sinister Texas Rangers, hallucinatory poets, illegal aliens, and racist high school jocks. His vivid recollections embrace lizard hunts and rattlesnake dreams, rock music and menudo making--all in stories that convey the pains and joys of growing up on the border. As Gonzalez leads us through his desert of hope and vision, we come to recognize the humor and sadness that permeate this special place.

The rhythm of vision, the rhythm of dream, the rhythm of voices saturating the hot southwestern landscape. These are the rhythms of Ray Gonzalez, the haunting incantations of "Turtle Pictures," Gonzalez has forged a new Chicano manifesto, a cultural memoir that traces both his personal journey and the communal journey that Mexican Americans have traveled throughout this century, across this land. He interweaves lyrical poetry, prose poems, short fiction, and nonfiction commentary into a lush cacophony that traces the evolution of today's politically charged Chicano voices from the deafening silence of their ancestors. Adopting the turtle as a metaphor for the Native American origins of border culture, Gonzalez frames this multitextured individual vision until it becomes a universal portrait of American life: a slow, ancient creature morphing into one of voracious rapidity. In wild and challenging surrealistic images, he hammers out a political statement from language that takes on a special urgency. Walking a fine line between lyricism and polemic, and succeeding where others have stumbled, he calls on Mexican Americans to return to their roots in order to avoid being swept up in American material culture. "Turtle Pictures" is a complex body of work by a poet totally in tune with the spirit and nuances of language, imbued with a deep sense of craft and literary tradition. It invites readers to revel in its richness and vitality, to be caught up in its chantlike spirit, to luxuriate in its hauntingly beautiful passages. It is a work to devour, to savor, to return to, for it speaks with all the rhythms of the soul.

The vast Texas borderland is a place divided, a land of legends and lies, sanctification and sinfulness, history and amnesia, haunted by the ghosts of the oppressed and the forgotten, who still stir beneath the parched fields and shimmering blacktops. It is a realm filled with scorpion eaters and mescal drinkers, cowboys and Indians, Anglos and Chicanos, spirit horses and beat-up pickups, brujos and putas, aching passion and seething rage, apparitions of the Virgin and bodies in the Rio Grande. In his first collection of short fiction, award-winning poet, editor, and anthologist Ray Gonzalez powerfully evokes both the mystery and the reality of the El Paso border country where he came to manhood. Here, in a riverbed filled with junked cars and old bones, a young boy is given a dark vision of a fiery future. Under the stones of the Alamo, amid the gift shops and tour buses, the wraiths of fallen soldiers cry out to be remembered. By an ancient burial site at the bottom of a hidden canyon, two lovers come face to face with their own dreams and fears. In these stories, Ray Gonzalez is a literary alchemist, blending contemporary culture with ancient tradition to give a new voice to the peoples of the border.