Rodney Gomez is the author of Citizens of the Mausoleum (Sundress Publications, 2018), Ceremony of Sand (YesYes Books, 2019), Arsenal with Praise Song (Orison Books, 2020), and Geographic Tongue (Pleiades Press, 2020), winner of the Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series. His work appears in Poetry magazine, New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, Verse Daily, and other journals. His chapbook Mouth Filled Night won the Drinking Gourd Prize from Northwestern University's Poetry and Poetics Colloquium. He edits an annual anthology for youth poets from the lower Rio Grande Valley and lives with his family in McAllen, Texas where he serves as poet laureate (2020-2021).

Other poems by Rodney Gomez in Verse Daily:
October 15, 2017:   "Loss" "Lately l have been a gap...."

Books by Rodney Gomez:

Other poems on the web by Rodney Gomez:
Two poems
Four poems
Twelve poems
"Rally"
"Mexican American Sublime"
Three poems
Three poems
"Calvarium"
"Their Bodies a Xylophone"
"Testament"

Rodney Gomez on Twitter.

About Ceremony of Sand:

"The remarkable vision of Rodney Gomez takes us on a necessary journey into the knowledge of the histories that wound us, and the cultural legacies that ultimately save us. Thriving with a pre-Columbian past and a politicized present, strumming to the tunes of Mexican folklore and pocho playlists, Ceremony of Sand celebrates the borderlands, its strangeness and its stark beauty: 'You cannot dismantle// the border wall. Take it/ apart, a house frame// in the hands of a boy/ who prefers a mallet.// Reassembled, a black lung.'"
—Rigoberto González

"Ceremony of Sand blurs borders of every kind. Human/nonhuman, body/mind, flesh and indomitable spirit. The sheer breadth of the social, political and ecological vision here is stunning. But this is a work marked, indelibly, by its emphasis on intimacy. On the ways we destroy one another and keep each other alive. In the midst of this clear and present chaos, Gomez seems to say, we must embrace our capacity for wonder, our hard-wired hunger for the impossible, as both respite and a weapon against the forces which work to hem us in. Even at the end of the world, we must find new ways to assemble, to remember, and to imagine what comes after everything we have ever known. Rodney Gomez has given us an anthem for that occasion."
—Joshua Bennett