Grand tour Poems

In this burning debut, Gonzalez devises bright lyrical narratives that touch on the speaker's deceased brother, abusive father, and her own bisexual identity. With a gifted eye for the verdant world, Gonzalez bends interior and exterior spaces, whether it's large windows "with their astragals and sashes" as they "glass out the bottle-green hills" or an unpleasant showerhead surprise: "the shock of sun, / the shock of cold water; / some boiler problem." With references to the Ivy League, classical literature, and Ancient Greek verb tenses (the aorist is unique in its failure to indicate whether past action has ceased or continues), Gonzalez's speaker evokes an air of studied if casually distanced erudition. The poet plays with this notion in "Failed Essay on Privilege" ("I came from something popularly known as 'nothing'"), and she confronts it head-on during time spent in a divided Cyprus, "Have I ever before been ashamed of my ignorant courage? / Never to have feared a border or a crossing." If academic pedigree breeds suspicion, it also, perhaps, helps her frame the death of her brother against Homer's Iliad in powerful juxtaposition, "On rereading, I find even / there, a man kills his neighbor."

Gonzalez's thrilling debut embarks with palpable urgency on a journey across the landscapes of friendship, family, and place. Divided into four sections, these sharp poems blend elegiac pain and sensitivity in a potent mix that cuts to the heart of what it means to be human. Lyricism and careful attention to the line create a propulsive tension throughout. "Whatever I take in my arms, I look like I am selling something.// The rainy weather will leave the country at four o'clock, the/ newspaper prophesies in Greek," she writes, grappling with the commodification of emotion and experience. Trying to reconcile the past and the present, Gonzalez writes about the transformative power of time: "I came from something popularly known as 'nothing'/ and in the coming I got a lot.// My parents didn't speak money, didn't speak college.// Still--I went to Yale." As the narrative unfolds, self-scrutiny about life and writing deepen, with experience becoming "a bridge of stars... to prevent some dying, on my way to the other side of the island." Erudite but never overbearing, this is a remarkable achievement. (Sept.)