{"id":2719,"date":"2013-08-23T14:24:54","date_gmt":"2013-08-23T14:24:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/?page_id=2719"},"modified":"2022-11-01T13:54:28","modified_gmt":"2022-11-01T17:54:28","slug":"black-blossoms","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/black-blossoms\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Blossoms"},"content":{"rendered":"

[column col=”1\/4″]\"Black<\/a><\/p>\n

paper \u2022 72 pages \u2022 15.95
\nISBN-13:\u00a0978-1-935536-15-4<\/p>\n

Add to Cart<\/a>
\n[\/column]<\/p>\n

Black Blossoms<\/em><\/h1>\n

Rigoberto Gonz\u00e1lez<\/h2>\n

Black Blossoms<\/em> explores the private lives of working class women of color, their difficult journeys. A\u00a0companion to Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s Other Fugitives and Other Strangers<\/em> (winner of the Poetry Center Book Award),\u00a0which recounted male lives, Black Blossoms<\/em> interweaves sex, death and violence\u2014the tragedies of loving and losing\u2014in surreal fairytales and magical biographies. Opening with \u201cMundo de Mujeres,\u201d Black Blossoms<\/em> first tells the famous story of androgynous German dancer Anita Berber, whose \u201cautobiography of red begs a coda.\u201d \u201cThe cut in her toe\u201d is just one of the moments when Black Blossoms<\/em> attends to the blood that beats through the veins of our lives, \u201chow you\u2019ll feel your way through\/ excursions and bleed to death. But that\u2019s existence: the opposite of coma.\u201d In Black Blossoms<\/em>, Gonz\u00e1lez delves into the breath-taking powers of language, the way a word can have a \u201cblack magic,\u201d capturing what we allow ourselves to see: \u201c[a] stunned passerby will drop a bottle of cranberry juice\/\/ on the pavement. The others will blink, surprised it\/ doesn\u2019t shatter, holding in the red lake in its lung.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the first of two extended series, \u201cFloreo,\u201d Gonz\u00e1lez looks to the floral, following Anne Sexton\u2019s hope\u2014\u201cI would like to think that no one would die anymore\/ if we all believed in daisies.\u201d \u201cYour life began this\u00a0way, with the dream of orchids, bone-white, gristle-\/ like, pollinated by flies,\u201d he writes, his imagery drawn\u00a0from earth as much as romance, a magical realism steeped in death and the body: \u201cYou dip a finger in your\u00a0grandmother\u2019s socket and paint\/ the scarlet back into her cheeks. Invent a name for this resurrection:\/floreo.\u201d In the second series, \u201cThe Mortician Poems,\u201d Gonz\u00e1lez continues to interweave femininity, death,\u00a0and vigor as he depicts the mortician\u2019s bride, who \u201cdab[s] perfume inside that soft warm space behind my\u00a0bra,\u201d and his daughter, who reveals \u201cI stop my heart. One skill I\u2019ve mastered here is playing dead.\u201d The\u00a0body surfaces everywhere in this meditation on lust and longing; su coraz\u00f3n se iba llenando de alas rotas y flores de trapo<\/em>, as one epigraph from Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca reads, \u201cHis heart keeps going, filling itself with broken\u00a0wings and paper flowers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

“Weeping Icons,” from Black Blossoms<\/em>:<\/p>\n

New York City<\/em><\/p>\n

I push open the window. Pigeons blend into the stone
\nledge as their small ruby hearts fade to charcoal.<\/p>\n

Delicate as ash, they erode with the wind
\nand leave the white daisies of their droppings. Stranger<\/p>\n

birds clutter the city sidewalks, their gray wings
\ncrushed into exotic fabrics too thin for winter.<\/p>\n

My socks are yellow cotton, the bedroom carpet
\ndeep. I step out of my footprints easily.<\/p>\n

From the mantel my mother weeps for me
\non the day of my birth. In every other photograph<\/p>\n

she mourns me. Her eyes melt like snow
\non the street, always darkening. The Labrador<\/p>\n

I bathed twenty years ago
\nsnuck into my parents’ room and splashed<\/p>\n

the television screen. The pope arrived
\non the Mexican peninsula to a parade<\/p>\n

of teary-eyed saints. My mother had been
\nfucking a stranger beneath the sheets.<\/p>\n

I remember that morning above any other
\nbecause that’s when both my mother<\/p>\n

and my faith began to fade. All things holy
\ncame in chalk or plastic after that<\/p>\n

and, too, the small god the priest placed
\nin my mouth finally dissolved<\/p>\n

the night my mother greeted her final star.
\nWhen she cried out I confused the sound<\/p>\n

with that groan of ecstasy the time I
\nfound her with her lover. What burden to carry<\/p>\n

her loneliness until my own demise. Motherless,
\nI have lived detached from the world<\/p>\n

long enough. Should I decide to take
\nflight, I will die by day, divide the sky<\/p>\n

into what will fall, what will rise. One stunned
\npasserby will drop a bottle of cranberry juice<\/p>\n

on the pavement. The others will blink, surprised it
\ndoesn’t shatter, holding in the red lake in its lung.<\/p>\n

About the Author<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[column col=”1\/4″] paper \u2022 72 pages \u2022 15.95 ISBN-13:\u00a0978-1-935536-15-4 Add to Cart [\/column] Black Blossoms Rigoberto Gonz\u00e1lez Black Blossoms explores the private lives of working class women of color, their difficult journeys. A\u00a0companion to Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s Other Fugitives and Other Strangers (winner of the Poetry Center Book Award),\u00a0which recounted male lives, Black Blossoms interweaves sex, death […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2719","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2719"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18408,"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2719\/revisions\/18408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourwaybooks.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}