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Rodney Gomez’s CITIZENS OF THE MAUSOLEUM

Rodney Gomez’s CITIZENS OF THE MAUSOLEUM

The Gettysburg Review is excited to share the news from Sundress Publications that Rodney Gomez's full-length poetry collection, Citizens of the Mausoleum is now available to preorder. Gomez appeared recently in the pages of our Autumn 2017 issue with poems, "The Horrible Burden of Consciousness" and "Warbler."

Gomez says of Citizens of the Mausoleum, "These poems, they circled me as I chopped vegetables, walked to the train, fed the baby. These are poems that both archive the bodies traversing terrains and become varying bodies/terrains themselves. Subjects destabilized and infused with one another. And then there is the surprise of both what a body is/might be and how it might (the body of the poem or the body of the speaker) sing. Moments of song: 'Instead, my body feeds on air' and 'Catrina, I folded myself / into a fox-faced bat / to neutralize the dark.' In so many ways, these poems, to me, are paintings. Potent. Alive. Saturated with song and diction. Loss.

An archive of loss which might also be an archive of love and/or reckoning.

How essential an archive of loss or violence is if we are to know how to place ourselves in history, how to talk about what we've inherited and what we must move toward and against."


Rodney Gomez is a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop and the proud son of migrant farmworkers. He is the author of Citizens of the Mausoleum (2018), Baedeker from the Persistent Refuge (2019), and the chapbooks Mouth Filled with Night, Spine, and A Short Tablature of Loss. His work has appeared in Poetry, the Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. He is the recipient of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize from Northwestern University, the RHINO Editors’ Prize, the Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and the Rane Arroyo Prize. He studied philosophy at Yale and earned an MFA from the University of Texas-Pan American. He works at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and reviews poetry for Latino Book Review.

About the Gettysburg Review

The Gettysburg Review, published by Gettysburg College, is recognized as one of the country’s premier literary journals. Since its debut in 1988, work by such luminaries as E. L. Doctorow, Rita Dove, James Tate, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Wilbur, and Donald Hall has appeared alongside that of emerging artists such as JM Holmes, Lydia Conklin, Jessica Hollander, Emily Nemens, Charles Yu, and Ashley Wurzbacher, who was recently named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree.

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