Other Fugitives & Other Strangers

$19.95

by Rigoberto González

“While the tension that never leaves these poems is, on the surface, erotic, what lies beneath the sensual energy is an awareness that sex, as the articulation of love, is tainted by our notions of how pure love should be. It’s González’s lyricism that joins the physical and the ideal, and demonstrates that the impulse to speak is a form of the impulse to touch. González’s honesty is itself a kind of poetry: there is an exacting focus here that speaks of hope without using the word. If we can look, we can change. These are poems of transformation.”—Bob Hicok

by Rigoberto González

“While the tension that never leaves these poems is, on the surface, erotic, what lies beneath the sensual energy is an awareness that sex, as the articulation of love, is tainted by our notions of how pure love should be. It’s González’s lyricism that joins the physical and the ideal, and demonstrates that the impulse to speak is a form of the impulse to touch. González’s honesty is itself a kind of poetry: there is an exacting focus here that speaks of hope without using the word. If we can look, we can change. These are poems of transformation.”—Bob Hicok

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About the Author

Rigoberto González is the author of another book of poetry; So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks, a National Poetry Series selection; two bilingual children’s books, Soledad Sigh-Sighs and Antonio’s Card; the novel Crossing Vines, winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Fiction Book of the Year Award; a memoir, Butterfly Boy; and a biography about the Chicano writer Tomás Rivera.

The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and of various international artist residencies, he writes a monthly Latino book column, now entering its fifth year, for the El Paso Times of Texas. He is contributing editor for Poets and Writers Magazine, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and an Associate Professor of English and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Advanced Praise

“While the tension that never leaves these poems is, on the surface, erotic, what lies beneath the sensual energy is an awareness that sex, as the articulation of love, is tainted by our notions of how pure love should be. It’s González’s lyricism that joins the physical and the ideal, and demonstrates that the impulse to speak is a form of the impulse to touch. González’s honesty is itself a kind of poetry: there is an exacting focus here that speaks of hope without using the word. If we can look, we can change. These are poems of transformation.”—Bob Hicok

“Follow Rigoberto González into these poems and you’ll come to a place where a kiss is a fig or a rock, where a fist is a rose, or a finger is a barb on a hook. Inside this dazzling kaleidoscope of words, González whirls us through the delights and terrors of erotic love, and into the forbidden, hidden, dangerous body of desire. He was brave enough to write these unflinching, brilliant poems. Are you brave enough to read them?”—Minnie Bruce Pratt

Other Fugitives & Other Strangers won the 2006 San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award. In addition, Barbara Jane Reyes calls Rigoberto “one of the highest energy, hardest working, and most prolific activist poets, or poet activists, I know.”

Reviewer Scott Hightower, writing in the on-line magazine Cold Front discusses the poetic roots and achievements of Other Fugitives & Other Strangers finding that, “Such poetic displays are breathtaking. Things split themselves, new architectures are declared, passion snaps around like lovemaking in a lightning storm. González keeps everything artfully contained in images…” The whole review is available on the Cold Front website.

In Volume 12, #1 (Spring 2007) of Rain Taxi, Miguel Murphy writes about Rigoberto González’s Other Fugitives & Other Strangers. Murphy praises González’s clarity and honesty, saying “For González, the idea of romantic love is challenged by the limits of bodily ruin. These poems consider the vulgar animalism of our most human affections. At their best, they bare themselves so perfectly you’ll flinch.”

The Fall 2006 Lambda Book Report has high praise for Other Fugitives & Other Strangers:

”While the lyrics that make up Other Fugitives clearly operate in a confessional mode, they’re often alternately as withholding as they are forthcoming about the emotional, psychological or spiritual details informing their respective performances. This opacity mostly heightens the artistry of the poems, and it allows the poet to strike a delicate balance between the most irreducibly idiosyncratic of his experiences and their more generalizable meaning to a reader. ”

The El Paso Times has reviewed Rigoberto González’s Other Fugitives & Other Strangers. In part, it reads:

González writes with economy and music while at the same time liberating revelatory imagery. His poems are rich with narrative meaning and imaginative lyricism. On first read, the aesthetic beauty of these poems intoxicates with its eroticism so that the underlying violence, though directly on the surface, feels submerged in this symmetry.


Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-49-1