The Outer Bands - (Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize) by Gabriel Gomez (Paperback)

About the Book

Gabriel Gomez completed his first collection of poems on language and landscape, voice and memory, during a two-month emergency residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute after his home in New Orleans was destroyed.

Book Synopsis

The Outer Bands is a first collection of poems from Andrés Montoya prize-winner Gabriel Gomez. The book is an expansive examination of language and landscape, voice and memory, where the balance between experimentation and tradition coexist. The poems realize a reconciliation between the writer's voice and the voice of witness, wonder, and tragedy; a dialogue between two worlds that employs an equally paradoxical imagery of the American Southwest and the marshes of Southern Louisiana. The book concludes with its namesake poem, "The Outer Bands," a twenty-eight-day chronicle of the days between Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, which together decimated the Gulf Coast region in 2005. The sequence poem, a pastiche and re-contextualization of images, news blurbs, and political rhetoric, travels and responds in a spare subjectivity to the storm. Gabriel Gomez completed it during a two-month emergency residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute after his home in New Orleans was destroyed.

Review Quotes

"Gabriel Gomez has a perceptive eye and a cunning ear, bands of cellos and bands of starlings. And then The Outer Bands, where none of us is untouched or unmoved by the hurricane of devastation, this new century, so replete with human failures. For Gomez the longing of retablos, the aching after faith, is balanced with clarity and knowing. His poetry is a kindness in the midst of a disordered world; a spire rising from the floodwaters. What a remarkable gift to us all." --D. A. Powell

"Gabriel Gomez . . . inventively makes audible what is ultimately 'inaudible for poetry' from the transformations of glaciers to the vows of retablos, from the power of song to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina." --Latino Poetry Review

"Gabriel Gomez is an accomplished poet, one who honors the resonance of language as well as reverberations of form. And, like a retablo, each poem shimmers with reverence, if not for saints and biblical figures, then for the beauty and poignancy of complex, contemporary life." --Valerie Martinez, from the introduction

"Gomez writes eloquently of distance, longing, need, and survival in a series of poems that culminate with a section about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans." --El Paso Times

"The title poem of this collection is a 28-day record of days between Katrina and Rita, which draws from the news headlines, the language tossed around by politicians, and realistic images of the storm to provide a portrait of just how dislocating, how jarring, how out of time that period was." --The Times-Picayune

About the Author

Gabriel Gomez is a poet, playwright, and music journalist born and raised in El Paso, Texas. He received a B.A. in Creative Writing from the College of Santa Fe and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from St. Mary's College of California. He has taught English at the University of New Orleans, Tulane University, the College of Santa Fe, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife Julie.