The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Circling the Tortilla Dragon, by Ray Gonzalez
reviewed by James Sallis

Ray Gonzalez. Circling the Tortilla Dragon. Creative Arts, 2002. 156 pp. Paper: $15.00.

Known primarily as a poet (seven books) and an editor (the Bloomsbury Review, twelve anthologies, LUNA), Ray Gonzalez here offers a mélange of short-shorts and prose poems that never fail to mystify. “The poets dance to a full moon because they don’t know what else to do with themselves,” one piece begins. In another a spider takes up residence in a dead baby’s shoes and a moth brings a message from the baby itself. Trash men casually toss into their compactor the Komodo dragon that has just eaten the narrator’s cat. “I raised him on too many nopales,” a mother laments when a cactus begins growing from her son’s head. Elsewhere a man returns from the dead to haunt the boys who shot him, and a devil wearing a Tupac Shakur T-shirt tells a son to shoot his wife-beating father. Few of the stories extend past two pages; most are about a page and a half. Gonzalez’s mix of the banal and the extraordinary is in every sense marvelous. His stories speak from chinks in the world’s bright surfaces. Old myths are torn down even as new ones are tentatively offered then just as quickly withdrawn; laughter gathers; the sidereal logic of dreams bleeds into the waking world—all in, say, 560 words. Gonzalez’s stories often remind me of Tomaso Landolfi, while recalling Boris Vian’s explanation of method: the projection of reality onto an irregularly tilting and consequently distorting plane of reference. Call them what you will—flash fiction, stories, sketches, illuminations—the texts of Circling the Tortilla Dragon desire and embrace us.