In 2021, The Yale Review
published two biting poems on love and capitalism by the poet Elisa Gonzalez. I had first encountered her work years earlier and been immediately struck by the unlikely combination of feeling and self-possession I discovered there. To read certainly one of her elegies, for instance, is to observe despair and rage be drawn, with white-knuckled precision, under grammar’s superintending spell. Syntax, in a Gonzalez poem, is a skin pulled taut over the roil of otherwise unmanageable moods: a daughter’s righteous ire, a bereft sister’s grief, a lover’s dazed wonder on the body beside her. Ultimately, the poem is less a document of the sensation itself—though that feeling stays keenly present—than a self-conscious...
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