Outside the Margins

Overview

San Antonio Express-News poetry columnist Robert Bonazzi gathers 20 years of reviews and profiles, essays and articles in Outside the Margins. Bonazzi focuses on poets and writers from Texas, the Southwest, Mexico and Latin America. His criticism finds threads of mutual interests, shared sources of inspiration, and stylistic confluences. He focuses on writers whose work has appeared in small and independent presses, providing the kind of insight only a former small press publisher/editor can provide. Bonazzi's reviews are both anticipated and respected throughout the Southwest. This is a major collection of his most important essays and reviews for the past two decades.

Reviews

[Bonazzi is] not only a remarkable poet but an important critic.... These are real essays that dig deeply in ways that most critics never do." —John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me

Robert Bonazzi takes readers behind that mirror for a fascinating look at a remarkable person, and it is the life and character of Griffin that makes this book irresistible and stimulates curiosity in the humane concerns of Black Like Me. —Booklist

"Man in the Mirror fills so many gaps in the story, and provides such detailed biographical preambles and postscripts, that the book is surely destined to become the critical resource of choice." —Chicago Tribune

"In this beautiful and stirring portrait of John Howard Griffin, Robert Bonazzi has given readers a sensitive and poetic understanding of the moral pilgrimage of one of the seminal writers and prophetic figures of our century. Bonazzi's portrait is more than a fine literary work. It is also a gift of grace to a nation more racially divided than at any time since Griffin was alive." —Jonathan Kozol

"In Outside the Margins, Robert Bonazzi shares 45 years of communal feast, dinner dialogue and solitary meal in word, visual image and sound; this is not the food of what he calls the 'gluttonous omnipotent alien white world,' but of those 'outside the margins' in 'the lively, marginal spaces left within our withering civilization.' In the Introduction, Bonazzi observes: 'Poetry (with a capital P) can be found in verse or in prose. It can also be aural lyricism in music, poetic tableaus in the visual arts, elastic bodies in dance, theater pieces and films that may include all these genres.' Indeed, reading Outside the Margins is like reading nearly 300 pages of arts-encompassing poem in one tome; poetry quotations interact with the commentator's reflective lines as comrades and compañeras." —Kamala Platt, San Antonio Express-News

"Outside the Margins: Literary Commentaries excels in its analytical commentaries because there are selections from a diverse group of writers that represent a unique style of writing and a rich thematic approach. One of the multiple virtues of the anthology is that it brings attention to the literature of the borderlands in the US Southwest, a literature that 'negotiates between Anglo society and the Mexican community' in search of its own identity. A key component of this type of literature is that it bridges frontiers because writers and readers are continuously crossing over political, social, and cultural boundaries in search of a community of their own. Bonazzi comments that in 'these narratives of otherness, we begin to hear the emerging chorus of genuine diversity.'" —José Banuelos Montes, World Literature Today

Author Biography

Robert Bonazzi is the author of the critically-acclaimed Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me. He only recently completed a decade-long project, the authorized biography of John Howard Griffin, to be entitled Reluctant Activist. His essays, reviews, short stories and poems have appeared in hundreds of publications—in the U.S., France, Germany, the U.K., Japan, Canada, Mexico, and Peru. He lives in San Antonio and writes a column on poetry, "Poetic Diversity," for the San Antonio Express-News.