Citizens of the Mausoleum

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