Customer Reviews

So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until It Breaks: POEMS (National Poetry Series)

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"Listen..." begins Rigoberto Gonzalez in his brilliant collection, "So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until it Breaks." And listen we must, because in these pages, an important voice in poetry emerges. Gonzalez, whom Sandra McPherson refers to as a " poet of two nations," brings us deep into worlds within worlds in Mexico. These are beautiful and penetrating pieces--they will make any poetry lover feel that amid the current wave of uninspired and unchallenging poetry, a poet with a unique voice and perspective appears. The poet Ai has made the right decision in picking this collection for the National Poetry Series. Finally, finally, a poet that poets can love and follow. Read this collection--learn what the title means, and enter the world it brings, dark, moving and powerful. A magnificent debut true and true!!!

I read this book for a summer class in college and I was blown away! The poems are definitely a cut above. And I'm one of those hypercritical readers of poetry. This one you can't put down. A warning to those who scare easily. Don't read these right before you go to bed they will haunt your dreams. Check out that man who distributes nightmares poem.

Throughout this stunning book of poems, the reader is fitted with a yoke of great psychological weight. "So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until it Breaks" is a recollection of violence and those who have lived and still live in a time of violence. The voices of the book are survivors in a landscape populated by so many silent bodies. Gonzalez gives voice to them. An act so necessary, so stunningly accomplished and crafted. Poems such as, "Mortician's Secrets," tell the stories of those who are otherwise forgotten. These poems also serve as transformative agents. Violence, though still terrible, becomes a tool for a grandmother to teach her grandson to read Spanish in one of the poems. This book and its profound obligation to these survivors, their landscape, and their loves leave this reader with a feeling of grief and wonder. These are not sparse two-dimensional photographs of people and moments to be tucked away in a shoebox. . . these poems are a gaze through the lens of nostalgia itself.

I am amazed how this poet manages to find the beauty in his community; how he manges to shape the darkness, like clay, scattered throughtout the experiences of people often left out of American literature. Fieldworkers, widows, migrants all are given room to exist on the page. The lives of these people are explored and reconstructed in a manner that doesn't scream "victim". Instead, the poet makes the reader aware of the almost casual beauty surrounding these characters. It is this insistence on protraying these characters in an "honest" light without injecting ethnocentric values into the poems that makes the poems resound, even after the pages rest on the shelf. These poems remind me of a line by Paul Monette--"people who were always singing and we were the song". Other Chicano poets have, lately, failed to remember in a way that seems new. Gary Soto, Alberto Rios, and Lorna Dee Cervantes, to me, are the holy trinity of Chicano poetry because they posses the tools of the poet: craft, beauty and a community to write about. Rigoberto Gonazlez will join the ranks of these three.

In the poem "Philandera..." the poet writes of "crocheted creations...extended only with the failure of crops: six doilies bought a week's nixtamal; a tablecloth kept even the chicken feet fat." This metaphor-izes how I felt about this marvelous collection. When one is feeling low for some reason, one can read these poems to still feel the beauty of the universe, in those details right under one's nose. A hint of sadness lingers throughout the book, only to heighten the redemption found in lucidity. If one sees as this poet does, one can never become nihilistic. Rigoberto Gonzalez's poems are "crocheted creations" which are like his Morelos: "puckered and kissable."

i'm surprised i haven't seen this writer in some of the country's top journals. this book is a great find. just take a look at poems like "the slaughterhouse" and "day of the dead"--this poet knows how to chill your bones with a fresh metaphor and an eye for the disconcerting image. these poems will shock you and please you in the same line.

This book is so mesmerizing! Try "Perla at the Mexican Border..." (p. 41):

Her job was to sort through the eyes/ of dolls. Snapping hollow limbs/ into plastic torsos had been a soothing task/ for Perla, like arranging the peas into the pod/

Beautiful imagery in very simple moments. Gonzalez doesn't take anything for granted. Small moments become big ones. This is exemplary poetry. I recommend this to everyone I know!!! The NPS made a great choice!

Rigoberto Gonzalez makes it seem so easy: his poems sing with a clear, uncluttered voice about our quotidian existence. But don't be fooled. There is great craft in those easy, flowing lines. This is a beautiful, slender book of poems; a dazzling debut.

Reading Rigoberto Gonzalez's poetics was a feast, a delight on a snowy night in New England. Having just returned from Michoacan, I savored the poet's use of space, diction, and lyricism, mapping a necessary poetics in the American imaginary.

It is clear that the poet is meticulous with language. He uses the senses to their maximum potential and creates something wonderful that is poetry. As an aficionado of poetry, I so anticipate such caliber of poetry and prose from Rigoberto Gonzalez in the future.