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Pure, Evocative Language
Rigoberto Gonzalez makes it seem so easy: his poems sing with a clear, uncluttered voice about our quotidian existence. But don't be fooled. There is great craft in those easy, flowing lines. This is a beautiful, slender book of poems; a dazzling debut.
[Monday, October 06, 2003]
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Beauty, Craft and Responsibility
I am amazed how this poet manages to find the beauty in his community; how he manges to shape the darkness, like clay, scattered throughtout the experiences of people often left out of American literature. Fieldworkers, widows, migrants all are given room to exist on the page. The lives of these people are explored and reconstructed in a manner that doesn't scream "victim". Instead, the poet makes the reader aware of the almost casual beauty surrounding these characters. It is this insistence on protraying these characters in an "honest" light without injecting ethnocentric values into the poems that makes the poems resound, even after the pages rest on the shelf. These poems remind me of a line by Paul Monette--"people who were always singing and we were the song". Other Chicano poets have, lately, failed to remember in a way that seems new. Gary Soto, Alberto Rios, and Lorna Dee Cervantes, to me, are the holy trinity of Chicano poetry because they posses the tools of the poet: craft, beauty and a community to write about. Rigoberto Gonazlez will join the ranks of these three.
[Friday, December 15, 2000]
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Raising the Voice: A New Poet on the Loose
Reading Rigoberto Gonzalez's poetics was a feast, a delight on a snowy night in New England. Having just returned from Michoacan, I savored the poet's use of space, diction, and lyricism, mapping a necessary poetics in the American imaginary. It is clear that the poet is meticulous with language. He uses the senses to their maximum potential and creates something wonderful that is poetry. As an aficionado of poetry, I so anticipate such caliber of poetry and prose from Rigoberto Gonzalez in the future.
[Monday, January 24, 2000]
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