The Price of Doing Business in Mexico: And Other Poems [Paperback]

Bobby Byrd (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1998

Southwest Book Award Winner

Byrd’s poems open a strange door—Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene are spotted making love in downtown El Paso, a private detective goes south to Toluca to find a revolution in his heart, a sad-faced clown in Florsheim shoes lectures the poet on the mortality of his mother, and Dante and Virgil show up to explain the true meaning of North Dallas.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In fixing his poems so firmly in the local of El Paso and the land beyond its adjacent borders, Bobby Byrd avoids the carapace of universality and in so doing becomes universal. Juicy tomatoes, fresh squeezed lemons-that lemonade at the L&J Caf, the mysterious "don't worry too much" of the Juarez Mexican always as if in dream, "the pitiful rains of August," Art in love with Elvis, and all the people-those there and those leaking across the border into the Gringo consciousness, and those remaining, darkly comic and enigmatic in that place of foreign values and perceptions: this and much more, and not as a microcosm, but a world translatable into the feelings of any man or woman, in any place.

The poet is central to this talk, these ruminations, but he is without controlling ego. It is not that understanding is beyond him, but that his poetry has nothing much to do with that. Wonderment in celebration, and what's celebrated is life simply, what too often goes without saying and is thus missed. Skill is obvious, in the flat and subtle lines, the rise to tenderness, confusion, and the comic; so is imagination. But it's skill and imagination in the service of a task: that one is honor bound to write out life as he comes to find it, in its complex dignity, to dream it only as it might demand. In Byrd's hands, poetry returns, as it must always, to the large world in which we live and die our little deaths. -- Toby Olson

Reading The Price of Doing Business in Mexico by Bobby Byrd is like eating one of the great dark mol sauces of Oaxaca: dark, complex, smooth and, in the words of Byrd himself, like a driver "slipping through the gears with angel grease." Not since Ed Dorn's "Gunslinger," or Richard Shelton's "Bus to Vera Cruz" have a I read such powerful surreal Southwestern narrative as I found in this book's title poem. These are poems of personal quest reverberating with the mythology of chili peppers, guns and cold beer. The way Byrd turns the mother of the speaker into a mythic dark presence moving through the poems is powerful and touching. There is so little poetry written with big mythic vision that is original these days. I really do love this book. -- Diane Wakoski

From the Publisher

Bobby Byrd has been writing poetry for nearly 40 years. He's been influenced by Black Mountain poet Paul Blackburn, who was Byrd's friend and mentor, and by William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Jack Kerouac. Bobby Byrd is one of the most accessible poets writing today. His work is compassionate, tender and joyful, and firmly ground in the everyday stuff of his life.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press; 1st edition (October 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0938317407
• ISBN-13: 978-0938317401
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,192,417 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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