Poetry

Heat of Arrivals

Ray Gonzalez's fifth collection of poetry takes the reader to the heart of the Chicano/American Southwest experience. His is the voice of the desert flowers, hardscrabble border cities, scorpions, snakes, adobes, petroglyphs, arroyos and mesas. The poems tell the stories of native peoples and invading Westerners, and the Chicano fathers and grandfathers who have long been silent.

The Grandfather

The grandfather goes down to the lanterns
and lights the stars.

He takes his bottle and recalls the rattler
he killed to make way for the family.

The garndfather shaves in the morning,
cuts his throat at night.

The blossom of what he knows
spills against the years of healing,

of going down
to the railroad lanterns

to light his aching arms and legs
with the ointment of his scars.

©BOA Editions, Ltd 1996

Available editions:
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Cloth ISBN: 1-880238-38-1
Price: $20.00
Publishing Date: January 1996
Paperback ISBN: 1-880238-39-x
Price: $12.50
Publishing Date: January 1996

FormatPaperback

Publication DateJanuary 1, 1996

ISBN1-880238-39-x

$12.50

Out of Stock

About the Author

Ray Gonzalez is the author of fifteen books of poetry, including six from BOA Editions: The Heat of Arrivals (1997), winner of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award; Cabato Sentora (2000), a Minnesota Book Award Finalist; The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande (2003), winner of the 2003 Minnesota Book Award; Consideration of the Guitar: New & Selected Poems (2005); Cool Auditor: Prose Poems (2009); and Beautiful Wall (2015). Gonzalez is also the author of three collections of essays, two collections of short stories, and the editor of twelve anthologies. He has served as the poetry editor for the Bloomsbury Review for thirty-five years and in 1998, founded the poetry journal LUNA. Gonzales is a professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota.