Congratulations to Rigoberto González, who is one of the highest energy, hardest working, and most prolific activist poets, or poet activists, I know. His book, Other Fugitives and Other Strangers, has just won the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award.
From the National Book Critics Circle blog:
The judge was Bhanu Kapil, who writes:
“I was incredibly interested in the combination of structural coherence and a content that kept transgressing/distending–through the force of what was being said, of the physical moment being opened up–the conceptual membranes of the writer’s identity, a figuration linked with cross-cultural trajectories. Inside the poems, for example, a body is “pierced,” “dilate[d],” “burst like an appendix,” and overwhelmed by a “passion so dangerous it’s fatal.” Yet, the book does not break. The formal constraint of a lyric mode, whether Gonzalez selects for prose or a progression of a traditional ode verse structure, does not break. Gonzalez is asking us to imagine a body that remains intact. Why? The answer, at least in my reading, comes on the last page, when the book’s language selects for the body’s futurity, a survival that’s both ephemeral and strongly marked.”
