Finalist for the 2021 Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry
Finalist for the 2021 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry
In Feel Puma, Ray Gonzalez traces his love of reading, philosophy, and learning with poems constantly in conversation—with each other, with texts by other writers and the writers themselves, with world history and his personal history and people he has encountered. Woven over three sections, this unique collection is a complex and gorgeous dive into creativity and the inner life of a poet at the height of his craft.
Ray Gonzalez knows how to draw a poem back and forth like a bird makes a calligraphy of the air or a rattlesnake spirals the dust. He knows how to dream a poem so real it feels like truth is a vortex and all the lines are drawing you into this other, deeper world he has called forth.
Gonzalez is a serious and seriously accomplished poet whose meditations on history—the history of literature, violence, art, our nation—are profound, intelligent, and moving. He is also a poet deeply attuned to the vast literary conversation around him, a conversation that moves and transforms with history, a conversation that lives in these poems.
Part mystic, part maestro—all master of language—Gonzalez has illuminated the sacredness of the world we stumble through. Feel Puma is steeped in Gonzalez’s voracious intellect—his kaleidoscopic knowledge of literature and history—but this book is beautifully steeled by his uncanny ability to see what no one else can.
Ray Gonzalez is the author of numerous books of poetry including The Heat of Arrivals, The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande, and Soul Over Lightning. He is the recipient of many awards including the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Book Award, the Latino Heritage Award, and the Minnesota Book Award. He lives in Farmington, Minnesota, and is a professor of literature at the University of Minnesota.
Part One
Las Ramas
Feel Puma
The Gate of Writing
The Book
At Age Twenty-Three
The Constellations Change Place
The Mind Blinking
Owning It All
The Sword Is the River
The Fingers Light the Western Stars
The Terraces
Cortez y la Malinche
Olmec
The Burning Father
Seven Fires
River Brown
Town of Frijoles
Part Two
West of West
Under the Rocks
Geronimo’s Canyons
The Only Known Photograph of Crazy Horse, 1877
Spirit Warrior Monument, Little Bighorn Battlefield, August 2015
Billy the Kid in Mesilla and Lincoln, New Mexico, 2013
The Mountain Still Shows
In My Head Is My House Unless It Rains
The Smell of Menudo
Cesar Vallejo’s Mother Sucks His Toes
Save
Honking at the Cemetery
Birds
The Spanish Poet
Federico García Lorca Cento
Part Three
Blue and White with Apollinaire in World War I
Black Veil and Mirror, November 9, 1918
The Death of Gerard, July 8, 1926
A Rhino Howling at the Moon
The Shadow, 1930
Soap Bubble Set, Joseph Cornell, 1936
Joseph Cornell Dreams of the Poet
Photograph of Kenneth Rexroth Leaning against a Bookshelf
Nothing Sick about Madness
Three Poets on the Stairs
On William Stafford’s One Hundredth Birthday, January 17, 2014
"The Virgin Rose and Sat on My Parachute"
James Wright Kisses the Minnesota Winter
Pick
My Photograph of the Ruins, Mesilla Valley, 1970
Assemblage
Stone Lion Shrine, Frijolito Ruins, New Mexico, 1978
If by Chance the Child Prodigy
Acknowledgments
