Ceremony of Sand

by Rodney Gomez

Set along the U.S.-Mexican border, Ceremony of Sand is an examination of hiddenness, of those things the borderlands want kept secret, of the banal violence that is both internally created and forced upon it. The collection exposes the futility of naming the borderlands as one particular type of place and tackles the complexity of its inhabitants, their contradictions, their language, and their failures. In poems both fatalistic and deeply hopeful, Ceremony of Sand serves as witness as it also addresses the complexity of developing a language of unique personhood while living inside a culture that expects recapitulation of its own aesthetics and beliefs.

Genres: Poetry

82 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2019

Reviews

[Barton Smock]

On earth, an angel begins to limp. And a demon sees what imagery cannot. And a church is made for the bell of unstruck awe. And the poems of Rodney Gomez enter the collection Ceremony of Sand to be washed of their stillness. Transformation is not a crossing, here, and Gomez knows, borderlands or brief heavens, one cannot call it art if it’s just a mirror with an off-switch. Nor can one call it map if it serves merely as a marker for where the mirror works. I love the sound of these poems, and what their speaker does with hearing. These seem scenes captured once by an eye keeping secrets for the ear. This care, this hand, a stopwatch doubling midnight beneath a wig going bald. This ceremony, this anti-rehearsal, a bright and sobering exploration of how easily uncovered one can become when separation is used as a means to dress witness in invisible greys. The dream: the one where I am waiting at the bottom of a small hill for the head of god. Dream I roll from. To mean: Bless this work its escape and bless the skeletal forms herein that tally transference. The dream: the one where language has two lovers and loses them both to an absence that has recently left departure. To mean: this language is alone.

[Benjamin Niespodziany]

Origin stories and ancient mythos blending into the modern, the border, the division. This collection examines identity while spiraling through hallucinatory fables that feel lost in time. Ghost-like, floating. The prose poems throughout this book are some of the best I've read.