by
Ray Gonzalez
American
Poets Continuum Series
This
collection balances ample selections from award-winning poet
Ray Gonzalez's six previous books with thirty new poems. Gonzalez's
early poems are dominated by Southwest desert landscapes and
deal with the pressure of conflicts between border cultures.
More recent poems upend prevailing stories about historical
figures, artists, and writers, create new animal myths, and
push traditional boundaries of the free verse lyric deeper into
surrealism. Consideration of the Guitar was a finalist
for the 2006 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry.
Federico
Garcia Lorca's Desk
It
was tied with guitar strings
into
a sack that held pigeon feathers,
the
hair of lost dogs--cardboard
from
a box of trinkets
he
received from North Africa.
Garcia
Lorca's desk was a bundle
of
things bearing down like an easy shot,
words
recalled when discontent
was
a shade of black,
coffee
beans stolen in silence--
a clock
over the hills waiting
for
the next moon.
Garcia
Lorca's desk was a head
of
lettuce, a bowl of goat soup,
the
place where tiny hands
were
named for their fingers,
ink
spotting the pages to buy time
before
three doors were slammed.
Garcia
Lorca's desk was his vow
to
stir the rain with rootless awe,
then
hide for years, come out
singing,
reciting poems
from
the warmth of laps,
paper
flattened on the desk
so
the sun could read.
Garcia
Lorca's desk was found
decaying
in an empty field
where
they lined him up,
the
feathers falling out,
guitar
strings rounding the sky
with
wired light that sank
into
the soft paper he used
to
wipe his hands
before
he was shot.
©
BOA Editions, Ltd. 2005
Available editions:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paperback
ISBN: 1-929918-70-4
Price: $23.95
Publishing Date: September 2005
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BOA
Editions, Ltd. would like to thank the following generous Publishing
Partners for their support of Consideration
of the Guitar:
Alan
& Nancy Cameros
Dr. Gary
& Gwen Conners
Bradley
P. & Debra Kang Dean
Suzanne
& Peter Durant
Dr.
Henry & Beverly French
Dane
& Judy Gordon
Kip
& Deb Hale
Peter
& Rob in Hursh
Robert
& Willy Hursh
Archie
& Pat Kutz
Rosemary
& Lew Lloyd
Marianne
& David Oliveiri
Boo
Poulin
Deborah
Ronnen
Paul
and Andrea Rubery
Paul
Tortorella
Pat
& Michael Wilder
