Grand Tour: Poems

by Elisa Gonzalez

Overview

Elisa Gonzalez's thrilling debut makes one "feel as if poems have never before been written" (Louise Glück).

Night Trains, the debut collection of poetry by Elisa Gonzalez, dramatizes the mind in motion as it grapples with something more than an event: she writes of a whole life, to transcendent effect. By the end, we feel we have been witness to a poet remaking herself by writing.

Gonzalez’s poetry depicts the fullness of living. There are the small moments: “white wine greening in a glass,” trumpet blossoms “panicking across the garden.” Some poems adopt the oracular quality of a parable but refuse a clear moral. The poet moves through elegy, romantic and sexual encounters, family history, and place—Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Poland, Ohio—all constellated in “a chaos of faraway.” The collection is held together less by answers than by a persistent question: How does one reconcile a hatred for the world’s pain with a love for that same world, which is indivisible from its worst aspects? “Since I do love the world,” the poet says, she keeps writing.

Gonzalez’s poems draw us nearer to our own aliveness, its fragility and sustaining questions. The young poet’s volcanic energy emerges from such great depth that when it breaks to the surface, it breaks blazing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374611385
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/19/2023
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	993,516
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, an essayist, and a fiction writer. Her work appears in The New Yorker and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. She lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/21/2023

Gonzalez’s thrilling debut embarks with palpable urgency on a journey across the landscapes of friendship, family, and place. Divided into four sections, these sharp poems blend elegiac pain and sensitivity in a potent mix that cuts to the heart of what it means to be human. Lyricism and careful attention to the line create a propulsive tension throughout. “Whatever I take in my arms, I look like I am selling something.// The rainy weather will leave the country at four o’clock, the/ newspaper prophesies in Greek,” she writes, grappling with the commodification of emotion and experience. Trying to reconcile the past and the present, Gonzalez writes about the transformative power of time: “I came from something popularly known as ‘nothing’/ and in the coming I got a lot.// My parents didn’t speak money, didn’t speak college.// Still—I went to Yale.” As the narrative unfolds, self-scrutiny about life and writing deepen, with experience becoming “a bridge of stars... to prevent some dying, on my way to the other side of the island.” Erudite but never overbearing, this is a remarkable achievement. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Book Riot

"This vivid, searching début collection traverses and troubles borders between nations, languages, lovers, the past and the present, the living and the dead; combining reflections on art and history with astute observations of everyday life, Gonzalez contends with the world’s capacity for profound suffering and for near-unbearable beauty in equal measure." —The New Yorker

"A mesmerizing book, deeply original, one of the most profound reading experiences I’ve had in years. There is in Gonzalez's nature something volcanic, a sense of fire originating at a very great depth, so when it breaks the surface it breaks blazing. Here are wild elegies to lost selves; here, too, poems of eerie delicacy and strangeness, radiating a kind of desperate sadness. But I love best the long incautious poems: here one feels most urgently her extraordinary force, her dignity, her savage hunger, her sweetness. These poems make me feel as if poems have never before been written." —Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

"Grand Tour is a diary of vigilance, a record of standing at arm’s length even from life’s most intimate experiences in order to appreciate their strangeness and, later, to capture that strangeness in words." —Anahid Nersessian, The New York Review of Books

"A stunning exploration not just of what we perceive but the shifting, illusory nature of perception itself." —Emma Bolden, The Rumpus

"Gonzalez’s poetry is as graceful as it gets." —David Starkey, Santa Barbara Independent

"In this lush, elegiac first book, Elisa Gonzalez is a stranger, a pilgrim, a visitor, a guest in pursuit of knowledge, passion, and a home. Innocence and youth give way to songs of experience. Reading her poems—with their revealing language, intimate plots, and masterful sense of the self—I feel my heart beat more quickly, like in the woods when a flower moon lights up the dark path again." —Henri Cole, author of Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022

"If the subject of traditional 'grand tour' literature was a rich European dude on a big soul-searching journey across the continent, Elisa Gonzalez’s is something else altogether: a queer American woman’s reckoning with grief, daughterhood, sexual independence, and the naked injustices of the modern world. As I read this exquisite book, I kept marveling at how many lives seem to fit into it, how many discrete and interlocking selves. Keen-sighted, effortlessly erudite, and bristling with near-perfect turns of phrase, this is an extraordinary debut." —Maggie Millner, author of Couplets

"Delicate, bracing as steel, Grand Tour is a splendid act of reconciliation. Between the self and its experience of the world, and, the more difficult process, between the self and its accumulated reality. In lines marked by an obdurate, flowing grace, the superb grand tour of Grand Tour magnifies the many revivals contained in one life." —Ishion Hutchinson, author of School of Instructions

"At the center of Gonzalez’s discerning Grand Tour are the excursions we all take in the world, making a home of it. These remarkable poems meditate on life as it is practiced: between borders. An ethical pilgrim and visitor, she surveys the unsteady givenness of a world polluted by the consequences of the imagination, demanding better scrutiny for ourselves, of our history and all that we have." —Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, author of The Life Assignment

"I would follow Elisa Gonzalez’s sensibility anywhere—ferocity meets tenderness meets humility, creating unexpected spaces of intimacy from wry, sideways glances to the reader, seeking and seeking and understanding too well there is no end to seeking. This is a poet whose wisdom runs ancient in its depth and breadth—a philosopher poet who declares, deliciously, 'Death to Philosophers!'" —Maud Casey, author of City of Incurable Women

From the Publisher

12/22/2023

In her debut, Gonzalez's tour not only takes readers across the world, from Cyprus to Poland to Puerto Rico and Germany, but it is also a personal journey. The collection includes letters to the poet's former selves at ages 13, 24, and 30, and reflections on family and grief, including the loss of a sibling, for instance in "Puente De Piedra": "And death—/ Were I just a little quicker to turn my head, might I see you there,/ in form perhaps something like the changeable blue no one living/ can describe, certainly not me?" Weather is also a theme that often appears in the collection, sometimes becoming its own character, and other times helping to build an undercurrent of alarm: "This morning even before/ I drew back the curtains I felt the smog/ in my nose and chest,/ a strong smog layering the light/ in the sky, tessellating yellow/and pink like a ballerina's tulle,/ a beauty not consolation/but misdirection." VERDICT Gonzalez's collection is a strong debut that is sure to captivate a broad spectrum of readers.—Sarah Michaelis

Library Journal