Winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the 2017 Witter Bynner Fellowship, selected by US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera

"Ray Gonzalez, a longtime poet, diamond-eyed traveler, observer of our Southwestern landscapes and peoples, is a most worthy writer to receive the Witter Bynner Fellowship. As a poet, he has covered much ground—not only as a professor and founder of many literary events throughout the nation, but also as a pioneer in experimental poetics; El Paso, Texas, histories and narratives; and incessant literary production. Ray has been at this for over four decades, not to mention his contributions in flash fiction, fiction, non-fiction, and his deep knowledge of American Pop musical culture. He is most deserving, most talented, and a true treasure for all of us." —Juan Felipe Herrera, US Poet Laureate

"Ultimately what Gonzalez does is allow the reader to experience this expansive American terrain through his image-driven verse. The U.S.-Mexico border is where histories and stories converge, not always pleasant but not always tragic, and certainly worth considering. Magic awaits the keen observer, the careful listener. Each poem encourages the visitor: 'Look. / Put your hands here. / This is a beautiful wall.'" —Rigoberto Gonzalez, NBC News

"Gonzalez’s dense, surrealism-inflected poetry does seem obsessed with mud. But each time the image appears, it transforms. Mud becomes angels, walls and clay — metaphors for the survival of Mexican culture under colonialism. This culture transgresses “the violent border” between the United States and Mexico. . . . With long sentences and repeated phrases, his poems have an incantatory rhythm that take the reader on visionary journeys through a landscape saturated with history and myth." —Star Tribune

"[Beautiful Wall] is infused with mythos and ritual, whether it’s a pilgrim finding respite inside the refreshing sanctuary of a cathedral’s shade, or a tourist inspecting ancient ruins...Gonzalez continues his invaluable role in American literature.” —Diego Báez, Booklist

“Gonzalez has a way of combining the mystical with the everyday and nature with the world of the family to produce poems lush with empathy.” —Library Journal

"Gonzalez...has established himself as a writer of place....[In his poems] landscape becomes a palimpsest where no single narrative reigns." —Publishers Weekly

"As a whole, Ray Gonzalez’s Beautiful Wall is a work of luminous intensity that emerges from the poet’s pure imagination. He calls upon both gods and poets to buttress his creation. Here the natural world and the world of surreal fantasy coexist. The voice of Gonzalez is the sound of the wind in the trees. His art is imbued with courage, light, and prayer. In short, he is one of those rare poets with the power to give shape to the unknown forces that guide us from birth to death. Beautiful Wall is a magnificent achievement." —The Journal

"Ray Gonzalez is a visionary poet in the classic sense, which means that he creates an entire universe of meaning and emotion in this collection of poems. Rich with an embrace of his Mexican heritage, Gonzalez is representative of the new voice of American poetry, the voice of immigrants and their descendants, and in the hands of someone as accomplished as Gonzalez, two things happen at once: poetry is brought down to the gritty level of real experiences, and real experience is raised up into poetry through the poet's keen attention to craft. This is a major accomplishment, and these are poems worthy of our faith and our close attention." —Bruce Weigl

"Ray Gonzalez has given us again a book of humanity and compassion. It is a pleasure to have him lead us from the Rio Grande to Montana, from Colorado to his hometown of El Paso, Texas, and all across the West in search of both the menacing and the luminous. And what a joy to travel, too, alongside Gonzalez's beloved poets brought to life here—Lorca, Celan, Levis, Vallejo, Kerouac, Bly, Neruda—and especially Weldon Kees, who fills the heart of this wonderful book in the sequence, ‘Crossing New Mexico with Weldon Kees’ in such a way that Kees becomes the Virgil to Gonzalez's Dante as they cut through the vast Southwest with its ‘tangled forms of faith and death.’ This is a book that affirms poetry as the art of a vast nation. Gonzalez celebrates and laments. He blesses and curses and brings both moral outrage and tender empathy to his subjects of lived lives and dying lives." —David Biespiel

"The gods in Ray Gonzalez’s Beautiful Wall—Xochipilli, Garcia Lorca, Huehuecoyotl, the mountain lion, and many others—help him guide us as we pass through walls that attempt to divide cultures, dimensions, even life and death. The spiritual journey he undertakes with us, for which he invents a new language as a golden bough, is not based on literary artifice. It comes from a place so deep that Gonzalez brings us with him, both in sorrow and in ecstasy, to an entirely unique vision of this world and all the others that hide behind it." —Lawrence R. Smith

Ray Gonzalez is the author of fifteen books of poetry, including six from BOA Editions: The Heat of Arrivals (1997 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award), Cabato Sentora (2000 Minnesota Book Award Finalist), The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande (2003 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry), Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems (2005), Cool Auditor: Prose Poems (2009), and Beautiful Wall (2015). The University of Arizona Press has published eight of his books, including Turtle Pictures (Arizona, 2000), a mixed-genre text, which received the 2001 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. His poetry has appeared in multiple editions of The Best American Poetry (Scribners) and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 2000 (Pushcart Press). Gonzalez is also the author of three collections of essays and two collections of short stories, and the editor of twelve anthologies, most recently Sudden Fiction Latino: Short Short Stories from the U.S. and Latin America (W.W. Norton). He has served as Poetry Editor for The Bloomsbury Review for thirty-five years and, in 1998, founded the poetry journal LUNA, which received a Fund for Poetry grant for Excellence in Publishing. He was awarded a 2002 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southwest Border Regional Library Association, and is currently a professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at The University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

A JUDGE ORDERS THE OPENING OF FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA’S GRAVE

PAUL CELAN’S ASHES

CHURCH

GODS IN THE ATTIC

BARREL CACTUS

LAST NIGHT

IN THE COTTONWOODS

THE MUD ANGELS, MESILLA, NEW MEXICO

LAS BRUJAS DE LA MESA, NEW MEXICO

HUMMINGBIRD ON THE PORCH

DOUBLE SEASONS

THE FIELDS OF LA MESILLA

ANTLERS IN THE TREE, LIVERMORE, COLORADO

TEACHER

STONE CUSHION

AXIS

THEY CALL THE MOUNTAIN CARLOS

THE BORDER IS A LINE

ONE EL PASO, TWO EL PASO

LANDSCAPE IS AN ABSTRACTION

STICKY MONKEY FLOWERS, MONTEREY BAY

JULIO CORTAZAR’S CAT

AGAIN

GIVE HISTORY A CHANCE

DRIVING PAST A MISSILE SILO NEAR LANGSDEN, NORTH DAKOTA

THE LYNCHING POSTCARD, DULUTH, MINNESOTA

FUCKING AZTECS, PALOMAS MEXICO

BURNING BREAST

TOUCH

STONE

THE DONKEY CART APPARITION, LAS TRUCHAS, NEW MEXICO

MEDITATION AT CANUTILLO

LIES

CROSSING NEW MEXICO WITH WELDON KEES

SNOW FIELDS ON FIRE

TO BE

THE SACRED FIRE

THE WAR MUSEUM

MY NEPHEW’S ARMY HELMET

THREE UNFINISHED MASTERPIECES

MAX ERNST WITH HIS COLLECTION OF KACHINAS, NEW YORK, 1936

RENE CHAR PAINTS ON A PIECE OF BARK DURING A NIGHT OF INSOMNIA

THE SOUL CAN’T PAINT ITSELF

BALD EAGLE NORTH OF SHELBY, MONTANA

THE PLAIN OF HOOVES

THE DRUMS

HOSPITAL

NICANOR PARRA

VIOLINS

17 YEAR OLD ROBERT ZIMMERMAN ATTENDS A BUDDY HOLLY CONCERT IN DULUTH, MINNESOTA, JANUARY 31, 1959

BOB DYLAN’S NEWPORT GUITAR

DUANE ALLMAN WITH THE CROSS

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART LEAVES HIS BODY

INVISIBLE GUITAR

DRIVING AROUND EL PASO, MARVIN GAYE’S “WHAT’S GOING ON” COMES ON THE RADIO

ZODIACAL LIGHT

THE FACE OF THE SUN

HAIR

MAX JACOB’S LEATHER COAT AND THE POSSIBILITY OF GRIEF

JACK KEROUAC BRINGS HIS MOTHER TO THE MEXICAN BORDER, 1957

SATELLITE

TWO HAWK SKIES IN MINNESOTA

THE EDGE OF THE WILDERNESS, NORTHERN COLORADO

THE DANCE

I ONCE KNEW THE BLACK RIDER

HUNCH BACK

A PERIOD OF ASHES

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF LOVE

THE RICHES