Bøger af Rodney Gómez

When the idea of putting together a collection of voices for the first volume of a youth anthology as part of one of my jobs as the City of McAllen's newly appointed poet laureate I knew it was going to be special. The Rio Grande Valley in south Texas has been in the scope of the whole nation as the border brother to Mexico. The youth of the RGV are a voice like no other. Yes, we have the same hopes and dreams, worries and opportunities, illness and love, but our hope is sometimes a distant aspiration. Nonetheless, we don't think it's unattainable.So we called our youth to rise and tell us in poems; What does it mean to you to RISE? Guess what? They rose to the opportunity to be heard. In this collection of Life, Love, Illness, Politics, and Hope the youth ranging from 3rd to 12th grade wrote from the heart.

"Editor: Erin Elizabeth Smith"--Title page verso.

Weaves together themes of loss, identity, ethnicity, heritage, and the mechanics of contemporary life to create a collection as lyrically arresting as it is aesthetically stunning. These visual poems, crafted with both restraint and vitality, are visceral in their depiction of cruelty and grief at the United States-Mexico border.

The winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, Rodney Gomez's collection Mouth Filled with Night employs familiar emblems of Mexican American identity to repeatedly subvert expectations while intensifying the dilemmas of affiliation. The poems run beyond more conventional ideas of agency, identity, and experience, creating a newly invigorated imaginative space.