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University of Pittsburgh Press (2012)
Envisioned as a genealogy of the heart, in this third book I explore how my family's emotion legacy has shaped, and continues to shape me. Each of the book's three movements trace my understanding of a particular part of my life from childhood well into adulthood. Born into the milieu of my Cuban exile familia, the first movement dives into early questions of cultural identity and the evolution of this restless sense of displacement that permeates my world. The second movement begins with poems peering back into my family again, but this time examining the blurry lines of gender, the frailty of my father-son relationship, and the intersection of my cultural and sexual identities as a Cuban-American gay man presently living in rural Maine. In the last movement, I'm focused on my mother's life shaped by exile, my father's death, and the passing of a generation of relatives--all providing lessons about my own impermanence in the world and the permanence of loss. In Looking for The Gulf Motel I am looking to capture those elusive moments that come to define us, be it through family, country, or love.
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"W. H. Auden, asked to define poetry from the other written arts, wrote that poetry was 'memorable speech.' Richard Blanco's speech invites the reader in with its search for home. His lyrics open doors onto his Cuban immigrant family, his father's early death, and his own migration from a life in Florida to a life in Maine. His speech houses a generous love of others and a persistent reach for what is absent. There is nothing here you will not remember."
--Spencer Reece
"Every poem in Looking for The Gulf Motel packs an emotional wallop and an intellectual caress. A virtuoso of art and craft who juggles the subjective and the objective beautifully, Blanco is at the height of his creative prowess and one of the best of the best poets writing today."
-- Jim Elledge"The poems in Looking for The Gulf Motel are bittersweet songs that ache with the 'sweet and slow honey of a bolero.' They croon about journeys from Cuba and Spain to Florida and Maine; mourn languages, lovers, and names that were or could have been; and praise the forgotten pop culture icons that expanded one young person's view of his nationality and manhood. If all loss is like exile, Blanco tells us, then searching for love (in the self, in others) is healing, is finding home, because 'love is thicker than any country.'"
-- Rigoberto González
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