Arsenal With Praise Song

Rodney Gómez's Arsenal With Praise Song somehow manages to yoke together lament and celebration, reproach and veneration across the borders of eras and nations. Set in the stark desert landscape of the México–U.S. border all too familiar to so many refugees and migrants, these poems scrutinize human bodies and the body of the earth as the sites of great injustices and violences—political, social, and spiritual—and as the vehicles that carry our collective legacy generation to generation.   Rodney Gómez is the author of the poetry collections Geographic Tongue (Pleiades Press, 2020), winner of the Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, Ceremony of Sand (YesYes Books, 2019), and Citizens of the Mausoleum (Sundress Publications, 2018). He is the winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Prize. Gómez is a member of the Macondo Writers' Workshop and edits an annual anthology for youth poets from the lower Rio Grande V