Letras Latinas,
the literary program
of the Institute for Latino Studies
at the University of Notre Dame,
is pleased to announce the winner
of the Second Edition
of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize:
THE OUTER BANDS
by
Gabriel Gomez
Following is an excerpt of the award citation, as pronounced by final judge, Valerie Martínez, at the Border Book Festival in Mesilla, NM on April 23, 2006:
[…] This is, most importantly, a beautifully written manuscript
which takes all sorts of risks. The first poem reads: "I'm telling
you a story of brick and bone…I'm handling their images in
my hand/ a series of retablos." And each of its four sections
defines the poetic "retablo" in very different ways. This
is a manuscript about language and landscape, and how the poet and
his companion exist in them and move through them […]
[…] the final section is a 28-part poem, 27 days in the "story" of
Hurricane Katrina and a postscript, with dates and newspaper headlines
followed by short poems that are provocatively different and resonant—some
locate us in the devastation of New Orleans; some tell us what's happening,
at the same moment, somewhere else; some speak to us in the rhetoric
of inept politicians. This is a moving account of home and destruction,
where "unrest was the least of it now; our mouths and throats
glowed into numbness as we ate."
The Outer Bands shows us a poet who is stretching the idea of what
poetry and self and home and country and allegiance mean. It is, all at once,
imagination and documentary, song and declaration. It manages the best of what
American poetry is doing, right now, as well as asserts its inherent and unique
Latino voice. This manuscript matters, both aesthetically and in terms of the
moments and stories it offers up on its provocative "little altars."
Gabriel Gomez was born and raised in El Paso, TX, spending much of his childhood in Chihuahua with family during summers and holidays. He received his BA in Creative Writing from the College of Santa Fe and an MFA from Saint Mary's College of California. Among his honors are a residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2005 after he evacuated Hurricane Katrina. Most of the poems in The Outer Bands were composed and edited during his time at SFAI. He has taught English at Tulane University and currently teaches at the University of New Orleans
