Rodney Gomez

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.

Rodney G mez's Arsenal With Praise Songsomehow manages to yoke together lament and celebration, reproach and veneration across the borders of eras and nations. Set in the stark desert landscape of the M xico-U.S. border all too familiar to so many refugees and migrants, these poems scrutinize human bodies and the body of the earth as the sites of great injustices and violences--political, social, and spiritual--and as the vehicles that carry our collective legacy generation to generation.

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 do not 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.

In this second anthology we continue to see the courage and truth in the words of our youth in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas. I am thankful for the teachers and librarians whoencourage and cultivate these young minds to write andexpress themselves through poetry. WE are extremelyfortunate to see the fruit of their labor in this anthology.There is so much heart poured into these pages, so muchsoul unleashed in black and white, and it is an honor toread their hopes and dreams. May they continue to keepdreaming, may they continue to keep writing and may weall take the time to advocate for the arts in our community- and most importantly, be an advocate for our youngpeople in the RGV.Si vas a so ar, sue a en grande.-Margie LongoriaYA LibrarianFounder of Border Book Bash: Celebrating Teens andTweens of the RGV