Cabato Sentora

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Ray Gonzalez's sweeping Cabato Sentora takes the reader tothe heart of the Chicano/American Southwest experience. Evoking magical realismin the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gonzalez writes of the successesand losses of the materially-poor, spiritually-rich Chicano townspeople andMexico's native Yaqui tribe. The result is a new mythology, one that honorsgourds, beans, guitars, fingernails, adobes, arroyos and mesas, even the headof Pancho Villa.

Reviews

"In this new collection, Ray Gonzalez locates the driven passion of poetry within his family, his ancestors, his people and their stories' root mysteries ... CABATO SENTORA is at once a ramifying and fulfilling book." - William Heyen.

"There is the voice of confinement in the pinecone, / a prism of laughter hiding in one shoulder, / mistaking the naked back for the need to run." ("There"). "Ray Gonzalez firmly opposes the Romantic and Symbolist dualism between I and the other, self and world. For Gonzalez, the landscape is not external to himself, nor is the past cut off from the present. His work, then is insistently political, suggesting responsibilities, even when its ostensible subject matter is dream or art. When Gonzalez makes his cabato, like 'the first man / who tied anything together, ' it is language that he crosses with spirit." -- Forest Gander