Beautiful Wall

Ray Gonzalez author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:BOA Editions, Limited

Published:29th Oct '15

Currently unavailable, our supplier has not provided us a restock date

Beautiful Wall cover

Galleys available: national mailing to key review/media outlets 4-5 months prior to publication. National print campaign: 100 finished books will be mailed to key and regional review outlets, specifically targeting Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The New York Time Book Review, The New Yorker, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Rumpus, Huffington Post Poetry, The San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, etc. National advertising in Poets & Writers magazine, American Poets magazine, the Academy of American Poets newsletter, Rain Taxi, and Redactions. Fall announcements will be submitted to Publishers Weekly. Blurbs from acclaimed poets Bruce Weigl, David Biespiel, and Lawrence R. Smith. Extensive promotion through BOA's website and blog; Facebook (6,200+ followers), Twitter (4,500 followers), Instagram (700 followers), and Pinterest accounts; print and e-postcards; print and e-materials; and print and e-catalogs. Electronic postcards to announce book publication will be sent to academic contacts, bookstore contacts, and literary bloggers. Electronic newsletter feature will be emailed to BOA's database of 3,000+ contacts. Author will attend the AWP Conference 2016 in Los Angeles, where he will have an author signing. BOA Editions will also be the Presenting Sponsor for AWP 2016, to celebrate its 40th anniversary, which will bring new attention to BOA and its new books. Ebook will be available at the same time as print publication to maximize sales. Ebook ISBN will be included on all press materials, author and publisher websites, and whenever print ISBN is listed. Publisher and author will be promoting both e and p through social media.

Set in the desert Southwest, Beautiful Wall straddles current realities of immigration and border violence, and a beautiful, familial past.Beautiful Wall takes us 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, Ray Gonzalez's new collection mounts the wall between the current realities of violence and politics, and a beautiful, never-to-be-forgotten past. Ray Gonzalez is the author of fifteen books of poetry. The recipient of numerous awards, including a 2002 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southwest Border Regional Library Association, he is a professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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 Baez, 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

  • Commended for Minnesota Book Award (Poetry) 2016

ISBN: 9781938160837

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 226g

120 pages