Samsara at Quantum Zeno, Arriving 2024
Gabe Gomez’s third poetry collection, Samsara at Quantum Zeno, tests the theory that through profound observation and the lyric impulse, we might stop time. The book is a blessing of invention and hard-won insights, drawing on found language, mathematical theory, science, ancient forms, and spirituality to consider where one belongs amidst the intimate pain of personal loss and the collective revulsion of hateful politics. With Gomez’s clear vision, we find the absurd in the everyday, the cosmic in the smallest details, our salvation in each other. The book’s very first poem, “Émigré” ends: “And I do not/ I do not blossom.” But Samsara at Quantum Zeno closes in a moment of bliss, the promise of a timeless “now. -Blas Falconer
Gabe Gomez practices a kind of poetic samsara, wandering across various real and symbolic locations to reflect upon the cycles of life. Throughout, he meditates on migration, racist politics, environmental justice, and the death of parents. As an embodiment of the quantum Zeno effect, this work experiments with multiple forms and serial structures, which creates a stillness of perception within the dance of memory and perception. -Craig Santos Perez
Gabe Gomez’s third poetry collection, Samsara at Quantum Zeno, tests the theory that through profound observation and the lyric impulse, we might stop time. The book is a blessing of invention and hard-won insights, drawing on found language, mathematical theory, science, ancient forms, and spirituality to consider where one belongs amidst the intimate pain of personal loss and the collective revulsion of hateful politics. With Gomez’s clear vision, we find the absurd in the everyday, the cosmic in the smallest details, our salvation in each other. The book’s very first poem, “Émigré” ends: “And I do not/ I do not blossom.” But Samsara at Quantum Zeno closes in a moment of bliss, the promise of a timeless “now. -Blas Falconer
Gabe Gomez practices a kind of poetic samsara, wandering across various real and symbolic locations to reflect upon the cycles of life. Throughout, he meditates on migration, racist politics, environmental justice, and the death of parents. As an embodiment of the quantum Zeno effect, this work experiments with multiple forms and serial structures, which creates a stillness of perception within the dance of memory and perception. -Craig Santos Perez
"Gabriel Gomez has a perceptive eye and a cunning ear, bands of cellos and bands of starlings. And then The Outer Bands, where none of us is untouched or unmoved by the hurricane of devastation, this new century, so replete with human failures. For Gomez the longing of retablos, the aching after faith, is balanced with clarity and knowing. His poetry is a kindness in the midst of a disordered world; a spire rising from the floodwaters. What a remarkable gift to us all." - D. A. Powell
“Gabriel Gomez is an accomplished poet, one who honors the resonance of language as well as reverberations of form. And, like a retablo, each poem shimmers with reverence, if not for saints and Biblical figures, but for the beauty and poignancy of complex, contemporary life.” - Valerie Martinez
"Color, mathematics, language, texture and touch imbue these poems with mystery . The poems are alters at which we can worship the fragmented nature of our world." - Sheryl Luna
"Gomez gifts us with his words like the eye of the storm. His poetry is heavily punctuated and relentlessly measured, but his subject matter is sublime: meditations on Vitruvian triptychs, on architecture, on aging photos of strangers, on wordless grief experienced by a person who literally loses his footing in the physical world." - Farren Stanley, Santa Fe Reporter, October 2005
“Gabriel Gomez is an accomplished poet, one who honors the resonance of language as well as reverberations of form. And, like a retablo, each poem shimmers with reverence, if not for saints and Biblical figures, but for the beauty and poignancy of complex, contemporary life.” - Valerie Martinez
"Color, mathematics, language, texture and touch imbue these poems with mystery . The poems are alters at which we can worship the fragmented nature of our world." - Sheryl Luna
"Gomez gifts us with his words like the eye of the storm. His poetry is heavily punctuated and relentlessly measured, but his subject matter is sublime: meditations on Vitruvian triptychs, on architecture, on aging photos of strangers, on wordless grief experienced by a person who literally loses his footing in the physical world." - Farren Stanley, Santa Fe Reporter, October 2005
"This is a book that sows words like seeds in the breach of sense and language, body and place, monument and ruin, self and nation. "There is material here that will start the rebuilding," Gabe Gómez assures us, and that material is found in the "the foreign/ body," the "broken English of immigrants," a "patois," and in "our mother tongue," where "a kind of melody/stifled by letters" tries to "sound out the new world." These seeds, "find patterns/ in the mayhem//from patterns in their flight." The Seed Bank offers hope, then, in the very materials discarded, splintered, unvalued, forgotten in the wake of natural disaster or assimilation or Monsanto: what each of us holds in our hands, our ancient seeds, our memories and nouns, our desires and verbs, our individual and hybrid voices, which can take root anywhere and disrupt the order with a field of wildflowers. We need this book to remind us, again and again, of our strength, our flexible syntax, our "hard breath blooming" against a grammar of destruction." --Rosa Alcalá
"Gabe Gomez composes spare and elliptical poems whose 'envelopes of waiting seed yield / an epistolary of vine and gerunds.' These poems marvelously conflate endings and beginnings, emptiness and fullness."--Arthur Sze
"In this startling series of linked poems, Gabe Gomez sets into dynamic tension a set of desires that seem at first radically incompatible: the will to change, to “plant” the new and to evolve into new selves, new formations, and the need for history, continuity, loyalty and its architecture, the stability of form. Gomez makes powerful elegant poems of these tensions and attentions, inventing verbal structures to embody the new growth as it “grips down” (as W C Williams has it) “and begins to awaken.”--Stephen Tapscott
“There is a permeation of poetic language and memory in Gabe Gomez’s second book of poetry, The Seed Bank. We hear and visualize “in illo tempore” in moments of ruination within body and landscape from a natural disaster. And we begin to meditate on the fragmentation of selfhood as “they stare up to their hands from cold paper / where a clutch of nouns ignite.” Though, even in the midst of catastrophe, words, sound, instill and create a process toward the renovation of person, place, thing; enough for us to experience “its / drinking / of the story.”--Orlando White
“The Seed Bank tells of that place where cultivation is to the cultural landscape what syllables are to a public climate---an “epistolary of vine and gerunds,” visual diffusion, “short sentence river,” or the mercenary timbre of other survivals. In the end, Gabe Gomez works into specific objects of sight and sound the hard matter that is the medium’s condition.”--Roberto Tejada
"Gabe Gomez composes spare and elliptical poems whose 'envelopes of waiting seed yield / an epistolary of vine and gerunds.' These poems marvelously conflate endings and beginnings, emptiness and fullness."--Arthur Sze
"In this startling series of linked poems, Gabe Gomez sets into dynamic tension a set of desires that seem at first radically incompatible: the will to change, to “plant” the new and to evolve into new selves, new formations, and the need for history, continuity, loyalty and its architecture, the stability of form. Gomez makes powerful elegant poems of these tensions and attentions, inventing verbal structures to embody the new growth as it “grips down” (as W C Williams has it) “and begins to awaken.”--Stephen Tapscott
“There is a permeation of poetic language and memory in Gabe Gomez’s second book of poetry, The Seed Bank. We hear and visualize “in illo tempore” in moments of ruination within body and landscape from a natural disaster. And we begin to meditate on the fragmentation of selfhood as “they stare up to their hands from cold paper / where a clutch of nouns ignite.” Though, even in the midst of catastrophe, words, sound, instill and create a process toward the renovation of person, place, thing; enough for us to experience “its / drinking / of the story.”--Orlando White
“The Seed Bank tells of that place where cultivation is to the cultural landscape what syllables are to a public climate---an “epistolary of vine and gerunds,” visual diffusion, “short sentence river,” or the mercenary timbre of other survivals. In the end, Gabe Gomez works into specific objects of sight and sound the hard matter that is the medium’s condition.”--Roberto Tejada
Click below to read poems: