Looking for The Gulf Motel

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 main thing about Blanco’s poems is how lyrical his voice is and how universal his themes, how easily we can relate to his concerns.– “Chamber Four”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”These are poems of poetic beauty and heart, confession and acceptance, courage and love. Wonderful.– “Synecdoche”

Richard Blanco, selected as the 2013 inaugural poet by President Barack Obama, is the author of three poetry collections: Directions to The Beach of the Dead, winner of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award; City of a Hundred Fires, winner of the Agnes Lynch Star