In Geographic Tongue, an important addition to the Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, Rodney Gomez weaves together themes of loss, identity, ethnicity, heritage, and the mechanics of contemporary life to create a collection as lyrically arresting as it is aesthetically stunning. These visual poems, crafted with both restraint and vitality, are visceral in their depiction of cruelty and grief at the United States-Mexico border. And yet, this charged landscape also gives rise to moments of tenderness, stillness, and wry humor. Gomez’s visual design is at once vivid and haunting, drawing together collage, diagrams, and abstract imagery into a bright, geometrically precise collection. His text casts such a powerful spell that in its absence, silence is heard as clearly as any phrase. Gomez writes,
You do not have to speak to speak truth,
and this lucid assertion is borne out in the collection as a whole. In its art, and in its silence, the poems of Geographic Tongue are undeniably and indelibly authentic.