Suggest Paradise: Poems

by Ray Gonzalez

Overview

Winner of the 2024 Kempner Family Book Prize for Poetry given by the Philosophical Society of Texas

Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, Ray Gonzalez returns to Texas and nearby New Mexico to meditate on love, literature, loss, and la línea in Suggest Paradise. The collection offers readers some of the richest and most complex poems that embody the Southwest and the borderlands, including a poignant look at the massacre at the El Paso Walmart. A unique voice of the Southwest, Gonzalez brings his intellect and his well-honed craft to this work and offers readers a nuanced and powerful perspective on poetry and the Border.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826364517
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	02/15/2023
Series:	Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Part One
The Trees
Offering Birds
Two Hands at San Elizario
Gift for a Believer
The Train
The Cane
Suggest Paradise
Photographs of the Dead
The Silence of Fernando Pessoa
The Error of Sleep
Mornings
Broken Boy Soldier
Conversion
Serpent Words
T-Shirt Shop on Santa Fe Street
Stack of Tortillas
The Language of Sunlight, 1956
One Pinto Bean
Night in the Border Town
Fear of Dying
The Coins
Solar Eclipse Totality, 2017

Part Two
Pueblo Dancers, Santo Domingo, New Mexico, 2004
Quietly Look Back
The Women
The Silence of Aime Cesaire
The Hidden Notebook
The Sparrows, 1978
The Death of Walt Whitman
Ancient Aliens
Picnic
Miss Atomic Bomb
Robert Oppenheimer's Chair
Still There
The Silence of Federico García Lorca
Rumins
The Message
Body of Rags / International Bridge between the United States and Mexico
The Dancer
The Alligators
Playing Poker with Raymond Carver, 1977
Homage to the Father
Last Night
La Frontera
Midnight Rider
River

Part Three
The Poem of One Hundred Tongues
Snap
Meditation Near Hatch, New Mexico
Table and Lamp
Fat Saint
No One Moved
Ears Full of Thorns
Ten below Zero, Country Road, Northfield, Minnesota
Three Snowy Owls
El Paso Massacre, August 3, 2019
First Anniversary, El Paso Massacre
"What a Man Wants Is the Power to Name the Terms of His Rescue"
The Bend at the Rio Grande

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

03/20/2023

Gonzalez (Feel Puma) interrogates history, modern society, grief, and migration in his nuanced latest. “I am here,” he writes, “and I want to listen.” These poems are a testament to such listening, which allows for recognition of “the river will outlast your// lifting hands.” Gonzalez juxtaposes ordinary lives with moments in history and stellar, imaginative descriptions of surrounding nature that witnesses human activity. The poems are rich with tender, near-magical moments: “the honeysuckle dripping/ the same water as the sea,” and, in snowy scene, a body frozen “in a profile that allows for grace.” In a poem about a mass-shooting at the El Paso, Tex., Walmart, Gonzalez recognizes “a Chicago man who devotes his life/ to making wooden crosses for mass-/ killing victims all over the country.” Applied to the ruins and painful realities of modern society, Gonzalez’s poetic eye offers a transcendent vision that is both fine-tuned to the particular and aware of the universal. These are graceful, powerful poems. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"This is a collection of making and memory—familial, literary, historical."—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Harriet Books

"In his new book, Ray Gonzalez maps an interior terrain of shamanic wisdom that does not ignore grief. 'My feet,' he says, 'are two owls fleeing the earth.' Gonzalez's Suggest Paradise celebrates a life-map into a deep self, a way into a paradise not simply 'suggested' but lived."—George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana

From the Publisher