The Outer Bands (The Andres Montoya Poetry Prize)

By Gabriel Gomez

Book Overview

The Outer Bands is a first collection of poems from Andr s Montoya prize-winner Gabriel Gomez. The book is an expansive examination of language and landscape, voice and memory, where the balance between experimentation and tradition coexist. The poems realize a reconciliation between the writer's voice and the voice of witness, wonder, and tragedy; a dialogue between two worlds that employs an equally paradoxical imagery of the American Southwest and the marshes of Southern Louisiana. The book concludes with its namesake poem, "The Outer Bands," a twenty-eight-day chronicle of the days between Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, which together decimated the Gulf Coast region in 2005. The sequence poem, a pastiche and re-contextualization of images, news blurbs, and political rhetoric, travels and responds in a spare subjectivity to the storm. Gabriel Gomez completed it during a two-month emergency residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute after his home in New Orleans was destroyed.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0268029725
• ISBN13: 9780268029722
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Length: 102 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.4" x 9.0"