Looking for the Gulf Motel

Richard Blanco, 1968-

Book - 2012

For this author, family continues to be a wellspring of inspiration and learning. This, his third book of poetry, is a genealogy of the heart, exploring how his family's emotional legacy has shaped, and continues shaping, his perspectives. The collection is presented in three movements, each one chronicling his understanding of a particular facet of life from childhood into adulthood. As a child born into the milieu of his Cuban exiled familia, the first movement delves into early questions of cultural identity and their evolution into his unrelenting sense of displacement and quest for the elusive meaning of home. The second begins with poems peering back into family again, examining the blurred lines of gender, the frailty of his fat...her-son relationship, and the intersection of his cultural and sexual identities as a Cuban-American gay man living in rural Maine. In the last movement, poems focused on his mother's life shaped by exile, his father's death, and the passing of a generation of relatives, all provide lessons about his own impermanence in the world and the permanence of loss. As a whole this collection of poetry is looking for the beauty of that which we cannot hold onto, be it country, family, or love. more