Cutting the Wire: Photographs and Poetry from the US-Mexico Border

by Ray Gonzalez, Bruce Berman (Photographer), Welsh Lawrence, Lisa McNiel (Editor), David Dorado Romo (Introduction)

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826359001
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	10/15/2018
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Bruce Berman is an associate professor of photojournalism at New Mexico State University and has been a working photojournalist for national and international publications since the late 1960s. For the past thirty-five years his work has concentrated on the borderlands area that encompasses El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico.

Ray Gonzalez is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Feel Puma: Poems (UNM Press), The Heat of Arrivals, The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande, and Soul Over Lightning. He is the recipient of many awards, including the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Book Award, the Latino Heritage Award, and the Minnesota Book Award. He lives in Farmington, Minnesota, and is a professor emeritus of literature and creative writing at the University of Minnesota.

Lawrence Welsh is a professor of English at El Paso Community College. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including the award-winning Begging for Vultures: New and Selected Poems, 1994-2009 (UNM Press). An award-winning journalist and essayist, his work has appeared in more than two hundred national and regional publications.

Table of Contents

Editor's Note
Lisa McNiel
Introduction
David Dorado Romo

Bruce Berman and Ray Gonzalez
It Should Have Happened Long Ago
El Paso
The Fingers Light the Western Stars
Under the Adobe
In My Hands
The Desert Floor
Footprints
Black Border Wall
Distance
It Flew Away
T-Shirt Shop on Santa Fe Street
Tortilla Factory
The Visitations on Alameda Street
Home Town
Wood
Chamberino
Resler Canyon
Everything that Comes before Reason, Aguirre Springs, Organ Mountains
Trying to Write Poetry
Pray Lizard
Looking for the Scorpion
Bilingual
The Cave at Bear Paws Site, Franklin Mountains
Searching for Max Ernst in Sedona, Arizona
Memorize the Trees
Solitude
Mesilla Moon
The Border Is a Line

Bruce Berman and Lawrence Welsh
Dyer's Angels
The Crossing
Desert Moon Driver
Virgin / San Lorenzo
Road to El Paso—Revisited
May 31
Shadow Burn
Mesa Blues
Smeltertown Crucifix
Last Exit: Doniphan
Socorro General Store
Toward Chinati
Old Railroaders
The Initiate
New Rosary
Border Light
Wolf and Sunflower
Dyer
Puro Oro Grande
Yellow Carnations / Day of the Dead
A Bath for Oro Grande
El Paso Smelter at Night, 1919
Ghosts of Asarco
The Gutting of Wildhare's
Where the Boys Are
After the Sons of Villa
Old Border Highway Blues
Somewhere in Texas

Contributors

Editorial Reviews

Cuts past polemics to deliver a striking view of life on both sides of the border. . . . Berman's photography displays impressive range, from candid slice-of-life shots to almost surreal collisions of landscape and human-made objects.
—Foreword Reviews

From the Publisher