Cutting the Wire: Photographs and Poetry from the Us-Mexico Border

by Bruce Berman, Ray Gonzalez, Lawrence Welsh

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.

Genres: Poetry

136 pages, ebook

First published October 15, 2018

Reviews

[Melinda Wheeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.