Calendar Home
Previous Reading:
« KATE GREENSTREET & JANET HOLMES
Next Reading:
RALPH ANGEL »
|
|
Open Books: Event Archive
March 29, 2007 07:30 PM
RIGOBERTO GONZALEZ
Rigoberto González's second poetry collection, Other Fugitives and Other
Strangers ($16.95 Tupelo), is erotic, passionate, and fierce. He has boldly
pulled back a curtain to reveal an intensely sensual and at times violent
tango, in which pleasure and pain, desire and fulfillment, possession and
loss are made manifest with elegant rawness. In these poems male bodies are
rendered graphically, unflinchingly, and ultimately lovingly. Here is sweat,
blood, and bruise, but also kiss and caress -- "Ask me who loves me and I'll
tell you / who I am: I am the keystone held intact by the arc / of his
arms." This collection takes its place in the long tradition of explicit
poetry written in the voices of agonized, damning, praising lovers, a
tradition that serves to remind us not only of the body's gifts but of its
temporality -- "I fit you like a coffin," he writes. In the meantime,
though, the poems declare, "I'm body. / I'm not a ghost, I'm living skin //
that craves the skirmish scars / of passion."
|
|
