Grand Tour

Elisa Gonzalez's thrilling debut makes one "feel as if poems have never before been written" (Louise Glück). Grand Tour. , the debut collection of poetry by Elisa Gonzalez, dramatizes the mind in motion as it grapples with something more than an event: she writes of a whole life, to transcendent effect. By the end, we feel we have been witness to a poet remaking herself. Gonzalez's poetry depicts the fullness of living. There are the small moments: "white wine greening in a glass," 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 doe 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 sustaining questions. "Since I do love the world," she says, she keeps writing, inviting us to accompany her as she searches.