Unpeopled Eden

Rigoberto González

Unpeopled Eden opens in Mictlán, the region of the dead in Aztec mythology, inviting us down into a world where “the men are never coming home” and “rows of ghosts come forth to sing.” Haunted by border crossers and forgotten deportees, lost brothers and sons, González unearths the beautiful and musical amidst the grotesque. These mournful, mystical poems are themselves artifact, a cry for remembrance “for those whose / patron saints are longing and despair.”

“Casa,” from Unpeopled Eden:

I am not your mother, I will not be moved
by the grief or gratitude of men
who weep like orphans at my door. 
I am not a church. I do not answer
prayers but never turn them down.

Come in and kneel or sit or stand, 
the burden of your weight won't lessen 
no matter the length of your admission. 
Tell me anything you want, I have to listen 
but don't expect me to respond 

when you tell me you have lost your job 
or that your wife has found another love 
or that your children took their laughter 
to another town. You feel alone and empty? 
Color me surprised! I didn't notice they were gone. 

Despite the row of faces pinned like medals 
to my walls, I didn't earn them. 
The scratches on the wood are not my scars. 
If there's a smell of spices in the air 
blame the trickery of kitchens 

or your sad addiction to yesterdays 
that never keep no matter how much you believe 
they will. I am not a time capsule. 
I do not value pithy things like locks 
of hair and milk teeth and ticket stubs 

and promise rings--mere particles 
of dust I'd blow out to the street if I could 
sneeze. Take your high school jersey 
and your woman's wedding dress away 
from me. Sentimental hoarding bothers me. 

So off with you, old couch that cries 
in coins as it gets dragged out to the porch. 
Farewell, cold bed that breaks its bones 
in protest to eviction or foreclosure or 
whatever launched this grim parade 

of exits. I am not a pet. I do not feel 
abandonment. Sometimes I don't even see you 
come or go or stay behind. My windows 
are your eyes not mine. If you should die 
inside me I'll leave it up to you to tell 

the neighbors. Shut the heaters off 
I do not fear the cold. I'm not the one 
who shrinks into the corner of the floor 
because whatever made you think 
this was a home with warmth isn't here 

to sweet-talk anymore. Don't look at me 
that way, I'm not to blame. I granted 
nothing to the immigrant or exile 
that I didn't give a bordercrosser or a native 
born. I am not a prize or a wish come true. 

I am not a fairytale castle. Though I 
used to be, in some distant land inhabited 
by dreamers now extinct. Who knows 
what happened there? In any case, good 
riddance, grotesque fantasy and mirth. 

So long, wall-to-wall disguise in vulgar 
suede and chintz. Take care, you fool, 
and don't forget that I am just a house, 
a structure without soul for those whose 
patron saints are longing and despair.

About the Author

Praise by Juan Felipe Herrera
Praise from Publishers Weekly
Praise by Bojan Louis from Waxwing
Praise by Luis Martinez from CutBank Literary Magazine
Praise by Katie Condon from Gulf Coast
Praise by Steve Oinen from Rain Taxi Review of Books
Praise by Jeremy Allan Hawkins from Pleiades
Praise by Kwame Dawes, judge for The Academy of American Poets’ 2014 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

“In Unpeopled Eden, Rigoberto González traces the border-crosser warriors who float underground in the realm of Mictlán, the northern Aztec exile-space of the dead. Yet this is not cultural archeology or language experiment. Here we enter under the skin and inside the bone of the death village. We fall into the gnashing river where no one really dies yet is ripped out of self and stuffed into a shell of half-being: the fantastic abandonments, the strange trinities of father, mother and son, all in a nocturnal neo-Juan Rulfo plaza of ‘concussion light.’ I marvel at Rigoberto’s groundbreaking new poetics—a rare, raw, lyrical, surreal, fearless, piercing tour de force.” —Juan Felipe Herrera
"The latest from the energetic and versatile Gonzalez (Black Blossoms) has a tight focus with potentially a broad appeal: its four long poems look hard at the victims and the antiheroes of the U.S.–Mexico border troubles, while shorter lyric poems, a verse-letter, and sharp experiments with nonhuman personae (a talking house in 'Casa'; a Gila monster) look at other intimate, familial and political bonds. The title sequence reimagines the 1948 catastrophe made famous by Woody Guthrie’s 'Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportees),' looking at its traces on the landscape, at migration’s everyday carnage ('The lesson:/ if wounded, stay behind to die') and at wider ironies: 'The chain gang called upon to gather/ the debris sang the Prison Blues/ all afternoon.' The poems 'In the Village of Missing Fathers' and 'In the Village of Missing Sons' consider interrupted generations with unmistakable reference to current events: 'That’s life/ in the village without handsome/ men… Some say/ they journey North to waste/ their days as kitchen slaves.' Gonzalez, also a prolific critic, memoirist, and writer for the young, sets big goals here, including formal variety. He also never limits himself to one subject, working hard to let in all the readers he can." - Publishers Weekly (Oct.)
"Though González’s poems concern themselves with death, the underworld, forgetting, and inhumanity, this is not a collection of apocalypse. Unpeopled Eden shows us ourselves because we all seek a border, we all seek betterment." Read the full review
"In these moments of sheer brutality, we witness Gonzalez crafting music out of incorrigible suffering. He looks at the ugly and asks us to look again. Gonzalez caresses us, lures us to his page, points our chins to his words, and says, 'look there, I dare you to eat.'" Read the full review.
“In his fourth collection of poetry, Rigoberto González crafts a world contingent upon its border, demanding you to consider the space a border creates within itself, the space created outside of its bounds, and what’s left of the abandoned after one crosses over." Read the full review.
"In the chaos, everything is transforming into something else. This combination of hard-hitting politics and surrealist technique creates powerful poems. What makes Gonzalez such an exemplary poet is that he makes his politics and his aesthetics work in tandem." Read the full review in the Fall 2014 issue.
"The poems in Unpeopled Eden are at once magical and chilling, lyrical in how they render these traditions into image and utterance, but without softening the violence or dampening the pain. They are documentary of the migrant tradition without getting mired in realism, and they are epic in perhaps the only sense we can have today: these poems tell the story of a people through the aftermath of their trials." Read the full review in Pleiades 35.1.
“When a single title is a complex and evocative poem, and when such titles recur throughout a collection of poems, we know we are experiencing a work of signature authority, beauty, urgency and necessity. This is what we experience in the book Unpeopled Eden by Rigoberto González —a work of profound lament and excruciating beauty… Rigoberto González is an important American poet, and Unpeopled Eden is a very, very important book.” --Kwame Dawes, judge for The Academy of American Poets’ 2014 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

Also by Rigoberto González

Black Blossoms

The Book of Ruin