Each day leading up to the April 16 announcement of the Minnesota Book Awards, and in collaboration with community editors from the award-winning Saint Paul Almanac, we highlight one of the thirty-two finalists. Today we feature 2016 Poetry finalist:
Beautiful Wall by Ray Gonzalez
Published by BOA Editions, Ltd.
Category Sponsor: Wellington Management
In his newest collection, Ray Gonzalez takes readers on a profound journey through the deserts of the Southwest where the ever-changing natural landscape and an aggressive border culture rewrite intolerance and ethnocentric thought into human history. Inextricably linked to his Mexican ancestry and American upbringing, Gonzalez mounts the wall between the current realities of violence and politics, and a beautiful, never-to-be-forgotten past.
Author Bio:
Ray Gonzalez is the author of fifteen books of poetry, including six from BOA Editions: The Heat of Arrivals (1997), winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award; Cabato Sentora (2000), a Minnesota Book Award Finalist; The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande (2003), winner of the 2003 Minnesota Book Award; Consideration of the Guitar: New & Selected Poems (2005); Cool Auditor: Prose Poems (2009); and Beautiful Wall (2015). Gonzalez is also the author of three collections of essays, two collections of short stories, and the editor of twelve anthologies. He has served as the poetry editor for the Bloomsbury Review for thirty-five years and in 1998, founded the poetry journal LUNA. Gonzales is a professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota.
An Excerpt from Beautiful Wall:
A Judge Orders The Opening of Federico García Lorca’s Grave
Leave the dead alone.
Federico is not with the other eighteen bodies that were dumped there.
Do not rewrite the myth.
Federico is not there because his poem about
the moon lifted him away long ago.
No poet leaves bones as clues to where they must go.
Read more:
Four Poems by Ray GonzalezReviews:
“Beautiful Wall, Gonzalez’s fifteenth published anthology, is a collection of poetry that spans from the quaint landscape of Minnesota to the storied streets of the border city of Juarez. The poems journey through both distance and time to bring the reader into the authors’ innermost thoughts, feelings, and fantasies. The writing resonates with the individual on a spiritual level that only strengthens as we, too, continue our personal journeys on the dusty road we call time.”— Ismail Khadar, Saint Paul Almanac Community Editor
“The gods in Ray Gonzalez’s Beautiful Wall —Xochipilli, Garcia Lorca, Huehuecoyotl, the mountain lion, and many others — help him guide us as we pass through walls that attempt to divide cultures, dimensions, even life and death. The spiritual journey he undertakes with us, for which he invents a new language as a golden bough, is not based on literary artifice. It comes from a place so deep that Gonzalez brings us with him, both in sorrow and in ecstasy, to an entirely unique vision of this world and all the others that hide behind it.”— Lawrence R. Smith
“Gonzalez has given us a book of humanity and compassion. It is a pleasure to have him lead us from the Rio Grande to Montana, from Colorado to his hometown of El Paso, Texas, and all across the West in search of both the menacing and the luminous. And what a joy to travel, too, alongside Gonzalez’s beloved poets brought to life here — Lorca, Celan, Levis, Vallejo, Kerouac, Bly, Neruda —and especially Weldon Kees, who fills the heart of this wonderful book in the sequence ‘Crossing New Mexico with Weldon Kees’ in such a way that Kees becomes the Virgil to Gonzalez’s Dante, as they cut through the vast Southwest with its ‘tangled form of faith and death.’ This is a book that affirms poetry as the art of a vast nation. Gonzalez celebrates and laments. He blesses and curses and brings both moral outrage and tender empathy to his subjects of lived lives and dying lives.” — David Biespiel
“Ray Gonzalez is a visionary poet in the classic sense, which means that he creates an entire universe of meaning and emotion in this collection of poems. Rich with an embrace of his Mexican heritage, Gonzalez is representative of the new voice of American poetry, the voice of immigrants and their descendants, and in the hands of someone as accomplished as Gonzalez, two things happen at once: poetry is brought down to the gritty level of real experiences, and real experience is raised up into poetry through the poet’s keen attention to craft. This is a major accomplishment, and these are poems worthy of our faith and close attention.” — Bruce Wiegl
The evening features a Preface Reception with complimentary passed wine and cash bar, author meet-and-greet, book sales and signing; the Awards Ceremony with live music, celebrity presenters, artisan cheese plates and breads, complimentary wine and lemonade, with emcee Stephanie Curtis of MPR; and the Epilogue After-Party with complimentary champagne, sumptuous desserts, and additional live music. Tickets now on sale, or click here for more information.
Today’s winner: Debra Geske. (We’ll be in touch via email, and arrange getting the book to you!)
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