Outer Bands

<p><i>The Outer Bands</i> is a first collection of poems from Andrés Montoya prize-winner Gabriel Gomez. The book is an expansive examination of language and landscape voice and memory where the balance between experimentation and tradition coexist. The poems realize a reconciliation between the writer's voice and the voice of witness wonder and tragedy; a dialogue between two worlds that employs an equally paradoxical imagery of the American Southwest and the marshes of Southern Louisiana. The book concludes with its namesake poem The Outer Bands a twenty-eight-day chronicle of the days between Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita which together decimated the Gulf Coast region in 2005. The sequence poem a pastiche and re-contextualization of images news blurbs and political rhetoric travels and responds in a spare subjectivity to the storm. Gabriel Gomez completed it during a two-month emergency residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute after his home in New Orleans was destroyed.</p>