Looking for the Gulf Motel / Richard Blanco.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Blanco, Richard, 1968-

Contributor:

Penn Sexuality Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Gift of the William Way LGBT Community Center (University of Pennsylvania)

Series:

Pitt poetry series

Language:

English

Genre:

Poetry.

poetry.

Physical Description:

83 pages ; 21 cm.

Place of Publication:

Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, [2012]

Summary:

For this author family continues to be a wellspring of inspiration and learning. This, his third book of poetry, is a genealogy of the heart, exploring how his family's emotional legacy has shaped, and continues shaping, his perspectives. The collection is presented in three movements, each one chronicling his understanding of a particular facet of life from childhood into adulthood. As a child born into the milieu of his Cuban exiled familia, the first movement delves into early questions of cultural identity and their evolution into his unrelenting sense of displacement and quest for the elusive meaning of home. The second begins with poems peering back into family again, examining the blurred lines of gender, the frailty of his father-son relationship, and the intersection of his cultural and sexual identities as a Cuban-American gay man living in rural Maine. In the last movement, poems focused on his mother's life shaped by exile, his father's death, and the passing of a generation of relatives, all provide lessons about his own impermanence in the world and the permanence of loss. As a whole this collection of poetry is looking for the beauty of that which we cannot hold onto, be it country, family, or love. Publisher.

Contents:

Looking for the Gulf Motel

The name I wanted: Betting on America

Tía Margarita Johnson's house in Hollywood

Cousin Consuelo, on piano

Taking my cousin's photo at the Statue of Liberty

Of consequence, inconsequently

The island within

Poem between Havana and Varadero

Habla Cuba speaking: 5:00 AM in Cuba

Practice problem

El Florida room

Sitting on my mother's porch in Westchester, Florida

Playing house with Pepín

Afternoons as Endora

Queer theory: according to my grandmother

Abuelo in a Western

The port pilot

My brother on Mt. Barker

Papá at the kitchen table

My father, my hands

Love as if love

Maybe

Cheers to Hyakutake

Thicker than country

Killing Mark

Love poem according to quantum theory

Birthday portrait

Mamá with Indians: 1973, 2007

Venus in Miami Beach

Cooking with Mamá in Maine

House of the Virgin Mary

Mi rosa y mi sal

Questioning my cousin Elena

Remembering what Tía Noelia can't

Unspoken elegy for Tía Cucha

Bones, teeth

Burning in the rain

Place of mind

Some days the sea

Since unfinished.

Local Notes:

Gift of the William Way LGBT Community Center.

ISBN:

9780822962014

0822962012

OCLC:

761852972

Publisher Number:

YBP7300582