Rodney Gómez is an urbanist and Poet Laureate of McAllen, Texas. His recent collections include Arsenal with Praise Song and Geographic Tongue, winner of the Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series. He serves as advisory editor for FlowerSong Press and a board member of Newfound. In 2020 he was awarded an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship.

Other poems by Rodney Gómez in Verse Daily:
June 19, 2020:   "La Llorona" "Walking a country road one late evening..."
October 15, 2017:   "Loss" "Lately l have been a gap...."

Books by Rodney Gomez:

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

Rodney Gómez's Website.

Rodney Gomez on Twitter.

About Arsenal With Praise Song:

"Rodney Gómez, with keen language and a lyrical awareness that pays homage to the land, people, and culture, captures not only what it means to be from the border, but the journey some must endure to arrive at a new life there."
—Esteban Rodríguez

"'The nights were hive and I grew used to them' writes Gómez as we follow the swarm through radiating deserts and dreamscapes. Something ancient troubles these poems into being. They are lit with the gleam of a knife's edge, as though the law declared: you will sing even though your throat be slit. These praise songs drift over kin and graves, river-water and history, so tender in their tendering. "She said the wind / would vole into a voice / plant its bugle / in every ear," and we will listen."
—Carolina Ebeid

"There is a moment in Rodney Gómez's Arsenal With Praise Song when the poet offers that "Where there is fire / there is mourning," and yes, these poems indeed are fire. Rife with it. From the wounds and the owls to the knives and the gasoline and the rivers and the cages and the fire of belonging, Gómez's poems invite us to mourn but also to give honor and to live and to name things and to remember, because as Gómez tells us, "We are all holy smoke." In the beginning, Gómez dedicates this book "For the missing," and I leave his collection with this line written on my wall: 'We carry their dust / inside our bodies.'"
—Joe Jiménez

"'If no one remembers, the stain disappears—' But Rodney Gómez won't let that happen in his haunting collection, Arsenal With Praise Song. And praise we do, as readers, joining in, when a father 'born / with bombardment in his mouth' must leave his family as 'cicadas wept'; when a 'wound is disarmed by the sound of waterfalls'; when faced with 'a salvage / birds rush to unpiece collapse / buzzard, vulture / the dove, surprisingly / with urn-like wings.' And we equally praise and come to examine those wings as much as the bee that comes 'projectile to the next world' and the 'brown recluse carries / the elevating poison of heaven.' In a world where violence and 'bullets / cannot possibly feed // a collapsar,' the speaker who is 'not a romantic / about pain' but wears it 'loose like the hand's bones around my throat,' transforms lyrical testimony into a wounded but awakened landscape through a series of questions that refuse simple answers. We walk alongside the speaker and feel the force of praise that can only exist as unflinching candor, in which Gómez asks us all to reexamine the very myths we treat as truth, challenging us to look closer at our world where 'every animal is a fuse' and 'the heart is a weapon.'"
—Rosebud Ben-Oni

"At its heart, this collection is an exploration of compassion itself, its rooms and its limits, which haunt the communities we create—like the family, like the borderlands, like the nation. Rodney Gómez's poetry, both intimate and expansive, is a gift to treasure."
—José Antonio Rodríguez