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Cutting the Wire: Photographs and Poetry from the US-Mexico Border
Winner of the 2019 Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association
2018 Southwest Books of the Year
Cutting the Wire , a masterful collaboration between photographer Bruce Berman and poets Ray Gonzalez and Lawrence Welsh, offers us a way to look again, to really look, at the border between Mexico and the United States. Berman, who has photographed and lived in El Paso for decades, is a documentarian who uses his camera to record what's in front of him rather than for, as he puts it, "mere self-expression." Berman's visual investigations of the everyday realities of the border--detention centers, smeltertown cemeteries, kids playing along a river levee, descanso crosses on telephone poles for the disappeared--are exactly the stuff the poetry of Gonzalez and Welsh is made of. The multilayered histories of the border landscape provide an inexhaustible supply of rich and fertile raw material for both Gonzalez and Welsh. But their poetic visions allow them to capture elements of a personal and collective past that historians have often failed to record.
2018 Southwest Books of the Year
Cutting the Wire , a masterful collaboration between photographer Bruce Berman and poets Ray Gonzalez and Lawrence Welsh, offers us a way to look again, to really look, at the border between Mexico and the United States. Berman, who has photographed and lived in El Paso for decades, is a documentarian who uses his camera to record what's in front of him rather than for, as he puts it, "mere self-expression." Berman's visual investigations of the everyday realities of the border--detention centers, smeltertown cemeteries, kids playing along a river levee, descanso crosses on telephone poles for the disappeared--are exactly the stuff the poetry of Gonzalez and Welsh is made of. The multilayered histories of the border landscape provide an inexhaustible supply of rich and fertile raw material for both Gonzalez and Welsh. But their poetic visions allow them to capture elements of a personal and collective past that historians have often failed to record.
- GenresPoetry
136 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2018
About the author
Ray Gonzalez
55 books13 followersThe work of award-winning poet and editor Ray Gonzalez is inextricably linked to his Mexican ancestry and his American southwestern upbringing. Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, Gonzalez has employed Chicano imagery in his poetry, oftentimes alluding to America's indigenous past, and particularly to the southwestern desert cultures. Gonzalez has published several collections of his poetry and has served as editor of several anthologies of writings, most of which emphasize the contributions of Chicano authors to the literary scene. These anthologies, including 1998's Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today's Latino Renaissance, provide a medium for many up-and-coming Latino writers to get their work to the public.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 16, 2019
An amazing book. For anyone interested in the Southwest and the border, these poems are soulful, exquisitely written (especially the ones by Ray Gonzalez), and informative. The photography is superb. The images and words really enhance each other.
Displaying 1 of 1 review