The Underground Heart: A Return to a Hidden Landscape

Returning to the U.S.-Mexico border area of his childhood, Gonzalez (Turtle Pictures), a poet and University of Minnesota English professor, presents 15 essays on coming back to the underground heart of his own identity: ""Just as Duane [Allman] on his motorcycle didn't stop in 1971, I don't want to stop."" In the twilit Spanglish zone of ""The Border Is Open,"" Gonzalez wryly listens in as a hassled El Paso cashier tells her co-worker to answer the phone by the cash register ""estan blinkiando."" In the title piece, a trip to Carlsbad Caverns is the occasion to admit a visceral urge to snap off some stalagmites and hurl himself into an apparently bottomless pit, though Gonzalez manages to report his letdown when the nightly takeoff of a couple of hundred thousand bats fails to happen. Gonzalez doesn't buttonhole the reader so much as argue by means of concatenated original observations: one of the essays brings together a qualified appreciation of Jim Morrison, a news item about two El Paso boys' hallucinogenic death by jimsonweed poisoning, a brief history of ethnic Barbie dolls, an account of the author's grandmother's funeral, a pr cis of Lorca's duende and New Mexico's invitation to tourists to visit the birthplace of the bomb. It's a formula that works well in these pieces, which reveal a restless mind committed to elucidating a complex culture. (Sept.)