Winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the 2017 Witter Bynner Fellowship, selected by US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera
"Ray Gonzalez, a longtime poet, diamond-eyed traveler, observer of our Southwestern landscapes and peoples, is a most worthy writer to receive the Witter Bynner Fellowship. As a poet, he has covered much ground—not only as a professor and founder of many literary events throughout the nation, but also as a pioneer in experimental poetics; El Paso, Texas, histories and narratives; and incessant literary production. Ray has been at this for over four decades, not to mention his contributions in flash fiction, fiction, non-fiction, and his deep knowledge of American Pop musical culture. He is most deserving, most talented, and a true treasure for all of us." —Juan Felipe Herrera, US Poet Laureate
"Ultimately what Gonzalez does is allow the reader to experience this expansive American terrain through his image-driven verse. The U.S.-Mexico border is where histories and stories converge, not always pleasant but not always tragic, and certainly worth considering. Magic awaits the keen observer, the careful listener. Each poem encourages the visitor: 'Look. / Put your hands here. / This is a beautiful wall.'" —Rigoberto Gonzalez, NBC News
"Gonzalez’s dense, surrealism-inflected poetry does seem obsessed with mud. But each time the image appears, it transforms. Mud becomes angels, walls and clay — metaphors for the survival of Mexican culture under colonialism. This culture transgresses “the violent border” between the United States and Mexico. . . . With long sentences and repeated phrases, his poems have an incantatory rhythm that take the reader on visionary journeys through a landscape saturated with history and myth." —Star Tribune
"[Beautiful Wall] is infused with mythos and ritual, whether it’s a pilgrim finding respite inside the refreshing sanctuary of a cathedral’s shade, or a tourist inspecting ancient ruins...Gonzalez continues his invaluable role in American literature.” —Diego Báez, Booklist
“Gonzalez has a way of combining the mystical with the everyday and nature with the world of the family to produce poems lush with empathy.” —Library Journal
"Gonzalez...has established himself as a writer of place....[In his poems] landscape becomes a palimpsest where no single narrative reigns." —Publishers Weekly
"As a whole, Ray Gonzalez’s Beautiful Wall is a work of luminous intensity that emerges from the poet’s pure imagination. He calls upon both gods and poets to buttress his creation. Here the natural world and the world of surreal fantasy coexist. The voice of Gonzalez is the sound of the wind in the trees. His art is imbued with courage, light, and prayer. In short, he is one of those rare poets with the power to give shape to the unknown forces that guide us from birth to death. Beautiful Wall is a magnificent achievement." —The Journal
"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 our close attention." —Bruce Weigl
"Ray Gonzalez has given us again 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 forms 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
"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
09/15/2015
In his 15th collection (after The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande), Gonzalez presents poems rich with cultural identity and blessed with a sense of place. They are arranged in three sections, with the first two the strongest and featuring many poems about the Southwest. The third section, which focuses on artists, writers, and musicians, offers several striking poems, including the imaginative opener, "Three Unfinished Masterpieces." Throughout, nature becomes a breathing presence ("This is not about miracles, but of the animal/ that leaves the water in its stillness"), and several poems pay tribute to the author's nephew, a veteran, whose PTSD contributed to his death: "I can't get it/ out of my head--/ an Army helmet as/ a deep bowl of sorrow." A ten-part poem that features Jack Kerouac and his mother at the Mexican border humorously describes Jack having a drug experience while showing his mom the sights. Occasionally, the author gets carried away, as in the page-length, one-sentence "Church," in which the verbiage makes the poem dense and hard to follow, but throughout readers will have the feeling that they are on a journey. VERDICT Gonzalez has a way of combining the mystical with the everyday and nature with the world of the family to produce poems lush with empathy. [See Prepub Alert, 6/14/15.]—Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN
