Grand Tour: Poems -- Elisa Gonzalez, Hardcover

Elisa Gonzalez's thrilling debut makes one "feel as if poems have never before been written" (Louise Glück).

Grand Tour, the debut collection of poetry by Elisa Gonzalez, dramatizes the mind in motion as it grapples with something more than an event: she writes of a whole life, to transcendent effect. By the end, we feel we have been witness to a poet remaking herself.

Gonzalez's poetry depicts the fullness of living. There are the small moments: "white wine greening in a glass," trumpet blossoms "panicking across the garden." Some poems adopt the oracular quality of a parable but invariably refuse a clear moral. The poet moves through elegy, romantic and sexual encounters, family history, and place--Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Poland, Ohio--all constellated in "a chaos of faraway." The collection is held together less by answers than by a persistent question: How doe you reconcile a hatred for the world's pain with a love for that same world, which is indivisible from its worst aspects? Gonzalez's poems draw us nearer to our own aliveness, its fragility and sustaining questions. "Since I do love the world," she says, she keeps writing, inviting us to accompany her as she searches.

Author: Elisa Gonzalez
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 09/19/2023
Pages: 112
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.56h x 5.57w x 0.57d
ISBN: 9780374611378

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 08/21/2023
Booklist 09/01/2023 pg. 27

About the Author
Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, an essayist, and a fiction writer. Her work appears in The New Yorker and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. She lives in New York City.