Unlike most book prizes, the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize is not awarded every year but rather every other year. A first book of poetry needs some space to carve out a readership, and that takes time. Having a winner announced on the heels of the previous winner’s book publication would hinder that process.
So it was not until April 23, 2006 that Valerie Martínez made public the news that The Outer Bands by Gabriel Gomez was the winner of the second Andrés Montoya Prize. In her capacity as final judge, she made the announcement at the Border Book Festival in Mesilla, New Mexico. Following is an excerpt from the award citation that Martínez read:
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, Texas and spent much of his childhood in Chihuahua, Mexico with family during summers and holidays. His poetry and prose are informed by multiple subjects and ideas, but he regards the basis of his work, says Gomez, as “a form of correspondence.” His general themes are varied, but the poems recognize a deep questioning of the natural world -— a correspondence to the environment and a conversation that, according to the poet, materializes as “You and I.” This dialogue between writer and witness is prevalent in his work. His literary influences include Federico García Lorca, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, Hunter Thompson, and Pablo Neruda. Other major influences include the architect Walter Gropius, Alexander Calder, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, and numerous musicians. He was awarded a residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2005 after he evacuated and fled Hurricane Katrina. During his residency at SFAI, he edited and composed The Outer Bands, which will be published by University of Notre Dame Press in 2007. He received his BA in Creative Writing from the College of Santa Fe and an MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California. He has taught English at Tulane University and currently teaches at the University of New Orleans.
The Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, according to its mission statement, “provides a space for artists who, while part of the largest and fastest growing minority in the United States, are also increasingly diverse in their modes of literary expression. The prize, therefore, does not privilege any particular style, subject matter, or aesthetic. While not losing sight of the traditions and conditions that gave rise to that literary expression, the prize has as its goal to nurture the various paths that Latino poetry is taking in the 21st century.”
Aragón has graciously consented to present one of his poems here at About Poetry:
