Grand Tour

Grand Tour, the debut collection of poetry by Elisa Gonzalez, dramatizes the mind in motion as it grapples with something more than itself. She writes of a whole life to transcendent effect. By the end, we feel we have witnessed a poet remaking herself.

Gonzalez’s poetry depicts the fullness of living. There are the small “white wine greening in a glass,” and trumpet blossoms “panicking across the garden.” Some poems adopt the oracular quality of a parable but invariably refuse a clear moral. The poet moves through elegy, romantic and sexual encounters, family history, and place―Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Poland, Ohio―all constellated in “a chaos of faraway.” The collection is held together less by answers than by a persistent question: How do you reconcile a hatred for the world’s pain with a love for that same world, which is indivisible from its worst aspects? Gonzalez’s poems draw us nearer to our own aliveness, its fragility, and its sustaining questions. “Since I do love the world,” she says, she keeps writing, inviting us to accompany her as she searches.