This collection balances ample selections from award-winning poet Ray Gonzalez’s six previous books with 30 new poems. Gonzalez’s early poems are dominated by Southwest desert landscapes and deal with the pressure of conflicts between border cultures. More recent poems upend prevailing stories about historical figures, artists, and writers, create new animal myths, and push traditional boundaries of the free verse lyric deeper into surrealism.

Ray Gonzalez has published 14 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and has edited 12 anthologies. He is the poetry editor of The Bloomsbury Review and founder of the poetry journal LUNA. He is a full professor in the MFA creative writing program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.