“A prolific author of numerous genres, including essays, memoir, and poetry, Gonzalez brings vibrant imagery and aesthetic allusions to his thirteenth poetry collection, a rekindling of the poet’s quest to find home, located somewhere between his birthplace of El Paso and his adopted metropolis of Minneapolis.”—
Booklist
“Soul Over Lightning is a spiritual exploration of the Earth and of the human mind. It is a carving into the wood of Ray Gonzalez’s commitment to language, poetry and his roots.”—Puerto Del Sol
“There's a restraint here, a lyrical sparseness that leans toward a meditational Zen-like medicine of a high order.”—Timothy Liu, author of Bending the Mind Around the Dream's Blown Fuse
“Set largely in the desert Southwest of his birth, Soul Over Lightning builds on Ray Gonzalez’s impressive career of attention to the reciprocal relationship of people and place. For over thirty years, he’s been at the forefront of this necessary investigation, and he continues to find new and fresh insights into our most fundamental and true selves. These poems range across artistic and personal touchstones; Rodin and Dalí share the endeavor with Man Ray and Charles Mingus, lyric turns to prose and back, and everywhere meaning comes as a solitary arrival, with ‘the coiled earth climbing into your heart / to welcome you home.’”—John Gallaher, author of In a Landscape
“In Soul Over Lightning, Ray Gonzalez reveals his unique genius for inhabiting the world of myth and symbol, so completely that words like ‘myth’ and ‘symbol’ start to feel extraneous. I mean that these are poems of the highest intensity, poems in which a lyric speaker both mourns and praises, but always balances deep feeling with expertly artful lines and sentences. ‘Let us imagine our hands reach,’ reads the first line of Gonzalez’s title poem, and that line holds true: again and again, this poet leads his reader into new and powerful depths of thought and feeling, terrain that proves both originally imagined and startlingly real. Ray Gonzalez remains a major poet, and this is his best book.”—Peter Campion, author of El Dorado
“This is a contemplative collection of poetry, a delving into the sacred, spiritual aspects and ideas of who we are.”—Tim Z. Hernandez, author of Mañana Means Heaven