Faith Run

Ray Gonzalez (Author)
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Faith Run offers the most recent work by the well-known poet Ray Gonzalez. The poetry here is—at once—perhaps his most personal and most universal. At the heart of these lyrical, sometimes ethereal, poems is a deep sense of the mystery and even the divinity of our human lives. Although Gonzalez invokes the names of many poets who have come before him, including Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Robert Frost, Charles Wright, Allen Ginsberg, and Federico García Lorca, he writes in his own singular voice, one sculpted by the scorched and windblown landscapes of the American Southwest, by the complications of life in a borderland, by the voices of ancestors. With the confident touch of a master craftsman, he creates a new world out of the world we think we know. In his poems, the personal suddenly becomes the cosmic, the mundane unexpectedly becomes the sublime.

For Gonzalez, it seems, we humans can transcend the ordinary—just as these poems transcend genre and create a poetic realm of their own—but we never actually leave behind our rooted, earthbound lives. Although our landscape may be invisible to us, we never escape its powerful magnetism. Nor do we ever abandon our ancestors. No matter how fast or far we run, we can never outrun them. Like gravity, their influence is inexorable.

These poems enchant with their language, which often leaps unexpectedly from worldly to otherworldly in the same stanza, but they cling and linger in our memories—not unlike the voices of friends and relatives.
 
“These stunning poems are profound meditations, urgent and authentic. They contain the minutest of details on big subjects whose weight marks Gonzalez’s graceful and radiant lines. This kind of poetry is tender, haunting, and transformative.”—Denise Duhamel, author of Ka-Ching!

“Few poets can sing as far and deep as Ray Gonzalez. His odes and meditations are in conversation with a wide range of poets (the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Li-Young Lee, and Allen Ginsberg) and with the men and women of his life. Here, as in his previous books, he has written a boundless, generous poetry that speaks to and for all of us.”—Terrance Hayes, author of Wind in a Box
 
“In his moving poem ‘Not Today,’ Ray Gonzalez writes: ‘When the artifacts of memory / disintegrated into nothing, / you were simply the signature in / fading ink.’  Gonzalez’s true signature is found in his poems that live on in the ‘territories in the mind.’ Faith Run is an extraordinary book of poems.”—Juan Delgado, author of A Rush of Hands
 
Faith Run
120 Pages 6 x 9 x 0.3
Published: September 2009Paperback ISBN: 9780816527694

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