In Geographic Tongue, an important addition to the Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, Rodney Gomez 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. And yet, this charged landscape also gives rise to moments of tenderness, stillness, and wry humor. Gomez?s visual design is at once vivid and haunting, drawing together collage, diagrams, and abstract imagery into a bright, geometrically precise collection. His text casts such a powerful spell that in its absence, silence is heard as clearly as any phrase. Gomez writes, ?You don't have to speak to speak truth,? and this lucid assertion is borne out in the collection as a whole. In its art, and in its silence, the poems of Geographic Tongue are undeniably and indelibly authentic.

Geographic Tongue

Comics & Graphic Novels

Gomez, Rodney

Graphic Novels

Pleiades Press

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. As a collection, Mouth Filled with Night gains particular momentum—a pitched anxiety that slowly grows throughout the volume—to create a poetic experience unique to the chapbook form.

Mouth Filled with Night: Poems (Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Northwestern University Press

Let A New Earth Rise: Rio Grande Valley Youth Anthology: A McAllen Poet Laureate Anthology Volume II 2019

Education & Teaching

VIDAURRE, EDWARD

Suárez, Priscilla Celina

Books, FlowerSong

Schools & Teaching

FlowerSong Books

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Set along the U.S.-Mexican border, CEREMONY OF SAND is an examination of hiddenness, of those things the borderlands want kept secret, of the banal violence that is both internally created and forced upon it. The collection exposes the futility of naming the borderlands as one particular type of place and tackles the complexity of its inhabitants, their contradictions, their language, and their failures. In poems both fatalistic and deeply hopeful, CEREMONY OF SAND serves as witness as it also addresses the complexity of developing a language of unique personhood while living inside a culture that expects recapitulation of its own aesthetics and beliefs.

Ceremony of Sand

YesYes Books

Review\n"These poems, they circled me as I chopped vegetables, walked to the train, fed the baby. These are poems that both archive the bodies traversing terrains and become varying bodies/terrains themselves. Subjects destabilized and infused with one another. And then there is the surprise of both what a body is/might be and how it might (the body of the poem or the body of the speaker) sing. Moments of song: 'Instead, my body feeds on air' and 'Catrina, I folded myself / into a fox-faced bat / to neutralize the dark.' In so many ways, these poems, to me, are paintings. Potent. Alive. Saturated with song and diction. Loss. An archive of loss which might also be an archive of love and/or reckoning. How essential an archive of loss or violence is if we are to know how to place ourselves in history, how to talk about what we've inherited and what we must move toward and against." 
-Aracelis Girmay\n"'Maybe it's the way I was brought into the world: dragged across a river in the night's quiet breathing...' writes Rodney Gomez in this stunning debut. His poems inhabit the spaces between the US and Mexico, youth and adulthood, between men and women, life and death.\n'Above, in the night sky, 
a siege of bitterns, an open hand.\nAnd when it closed: 
unrest.'\nThe unrest of which Gomez speaks is the struggle for selfhood in this space, to find the what anchors and what restores. His poems show us just how voluptuous (like spells) metaphor can be in the recovery of all our holy, lost saints. Citizens of the Mausoleum is the river itself, a body singing the difficult and luminous details of survival, a terrific manual for living on borders. 
-Connie Voisine\n"Gomez gives Coyolxauhqui and the other subjects in this book a poetry that is a bold construct of feeling and thought in highly evocative, often surreal and magical language. Citizens of the Mausoleum opens, for instance, with a poem cataloging the ephemera taken by anthropologists from fifty-two plots in a county burial park, sometimes multiple people in a single body bag. More than a mere list, these objects are evidence of the complex lives people lived up to their deaths in the desert. Throughout the book Gomez fills in that evidence with poems exhibiting the intensity of the lives and the love, familial, matriarchal and spiritual, experienced by his people." 
-Ed Roberson\n"Rodney Gomez's love of words springs forth full force in Citizens of the Mausoleum. Complex characters face loss and engage in mythical scenarios that dazzle. With wildly bold language, Gomez makes imaginative leaps that surprise and captivate. This collection examines death, the body and belief. It is utterly mesmerizing." 
-Sheryl Luna

Citizens of the Mausoleum

Sundress Publications

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Books by Gomez, Rodney