The winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, Rodney Gomez’s collection Mouth Filled with Night employs familiar emblems of Mexican American identity to repeatedly subvert expectations while intensifying the dilemmas of affiliation. The poems run beyond more conventional ideas of agency, identity, and experience, creating a newly invigorated imaginative space. As a collection, Mouth Filled with Night gains particular momentum–a pitched anxiety that slowly grows throughout the volume–to create a poetic experience unique to the chapbook form.

You can purchase the collection directly from Northwestern University Press HERE.

Rodney Gomez lives in Brownsville, Texas and works as an urban planner. He holds a BA from Yale and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas – Pan American. His poems have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Denver Quarterly, Devil’s Lake, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Fourteen Hills, Barrow Street, The Literary Review, Nimrod, and Salt Hill. He has received the Editors’ Prize from RHINO and residencies from the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Santa Fe Art Institute. He sits on the board of Migrant Health Promotion, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the health and well-being of migrants, immigrants, and related populations.