Grand Tour
“After My Brother’s Death, I Reflect on the Iliad” serves as a sobering touchstone in Elisa Gonzalez’s Grand Tour; in 2021, the poet’s brother was murdered at age 22, and the book is dedicated to him. Yet the speaker’s own loss of innocence is what drives the book: death is first encountered as a performance, recounted in “Song of Experience,” in which the speaker’s father
died on the cross, waist wrapped in a sheet my mother hadn’t
wanted to surrender. His head lolled on his shoulder. The
centurion, Mr. Garza, gored his side. I was punished later for
disturbing the service, for running up to touch his feet, for
wailing—It was my father’s performance, interrupted before
resurrection, and after that I think it’s safe to say I was not innocent anymore.
The title poem tracks the death of a marriage, journeying from “dollar-store rings onto ring fingers” to “evenings, we read novels in separate rooms / or in the same room and it makes no difference.” The couple’s “grand tour” unfolds in borrowed apartments in Berlin and Warsaw and with “metal murders / perched on balconies. Blank iron eyes.” Crows, of course. Elsewhere, the speaker notes, “All my husband’s happiness lives in the past. And this, the afterlife?”
It comes as no surprise that Gonzalez is also a novelist. Striking characters and inciting incidents open several poems: “The shoe man tells the carob man to tell the tea woman to stop”; R, aged 13, “explained that her parents forbade her showering alone / because she had been masturbating”; and a Croatian husband and wife are both in love with a “professional flautist.” And “First Tuesday in May” opens
My grandmother died the day
the missionaries came for our souls.
To save them, I mean.
Yet in Gonzalez’s hands, narrative hooks transform into resonant images. The missionaries’ “hands waved hello. / There was nothing / for the bicycles to do.” These poems build into sure lyric endings, as in the conclusion of “Ice Storm”:
But a wet spring came upon us,
and my dreams went dark,
after which I learned there are several methods
for disposing of the dead.
