Cutting the Wire - by Ray Gonzalez & Lawrence Welsh (Paperback)

About the Book

Cutting the Wire, a masterful collaboration between photographer Bruce Berman and poets Ray Gonzalez and Lawrence Welsh, offers us a way to look again, to really look, at the border between Mexico and the United States.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2019 Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association
2018 Southwest Books of the Year

Cutting the Wire, a masterful collaboration between photographer Bruce Berman and poets Ray Gonzalez and Lawrence Welsh, offers us a way to look again, to really look, at the border between Mexico and the United States. Berman, who has photographed and lived in El Paso for decades, is a documentarian who uses his camera to record what's in front of him rather than for, as he puts it, "mere self-expression." Berman's visual investigations of the everyday realities of the border--detention centers, smeltertown cemeteries, kids playing along a river levee, descanso crosses on telephone poles for the disappeared--are exactly the stuff the poetry of Gonzalez and Welsh is made of. The multilayered histories of the border landscape provide an inexhaustible supply of rich and fertile raw material for both Gonzalez and Welsh. But their poetic visions allow them to capture elements of a personal and collective past that historians have often failed to record.

Review Quotes

"Cuts past polemics to deliver a striking view of life on both sides of the border. . . . Berman's photography displays impressive range, from candid slice-of-life shots to almost surreal collisions of landscape and human-made objects."

"Two poets and a photojournalist capture the complexity, desolation, and richness of the borderlands in this melding of literature with visual art. . . . The work is an organically cohesive, gritty, rich, revealing, transcendent portrait of the borderlands."