Grand Tour: Poems
Elisa Gonzalez
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From the publisher
A stunning debut poetry collection from one of America's rising literary stars:
‘A mesmerizing book, deeply original, one of the most profound reading experiences I’ve had in years … one feels most urgently her extraordinary force, her dignity, her savage hunger, her sweetness. These poems make me feel as if poems have never before been written’ - Louise Glück
Grand Tour, the debut collection of poetry by Elisa Gonzalez, dramatizes the mind in motion as it grapples with something more than an event: she writes of a whole life, to transcendent effect. By the end, we feel we have been witness to a poet remaking herself.
Gonzalez's poetry depicts the fullness of living. There are the small moments: "white wine greening in a glass," trumpet blossoms "panicking across the garden." Some poems adopt the oracular quality of a parable but invariably refuse a clear moral. The poet moves through elegy, romantic and sexual encounters, family history, and place--Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Poland, Ohio--all constellated in "a chaos of faraway." The collection is held together less by answers than by a persistent question: How doe you reconcile a hatred for the world's pain with a love for that same world, which is indivisible from its worst aspects? Gonzalez's poems draw us nearer to our own aliveness, its fragility and sustaining questions. "Since I do love the world," she says, she keeps writing, inviting us to accompany her as she searches.