Armando Gonzalez

T.S. Eliot talks about how our first instinct as critics is to remark on the departures a poet takes from tradition. Meaning that the most outrageous parts or language of the poem is what we notice and fall in love with first. Like Dean Young, Paisley Rekdal, or Clayton Eshelmann, these collected poems of Armando Gonzalez draw attention to the fact that certain poetry can be cutting edge, visionary, and completely different.

Prepare to fall in love with Armando's poetry. His poems are like explosions. Fantastic detonations. What his poetry proposes is nothing less than a full reconciliation of humankind’s collapse with language, using nothing but line breaks and hope. These poems are a stunning vision of the humanity created by technology, runaway mega-corporations, constant media bombardment and general universal moral rot. These poems have the originality that accompanies great art. Armando’s work takes on a life of its own. He manages to combine so many elements such as surrealism, science, visual art, and anthropology into a fascinating anthology. The best indicator of artistic integrity is its effect on people. These poems may confuse you. They may frustrate you. But they will dwell within you. And you will fall in love.

SAN FRANCISCO REVIEW BOOK REVIEW BY KATHRYN DARE:

Armando Gonzalez’s Devil’s Roadtrip is a sharp, haunting, and darkly funny poetry collection that drives straight into the heart of human contradiction. At just 65 pages, it’s a compact but potent ride — a desert roadtrip through despair, memory, desire, and absurdity, with the devil himself riding shotgun.

What resonated with me was Gonzalez’s ability to be both unfiltered and deeply poetic. His Lucifer is not some abstract evil — he’s a beer-drinking, cowboy-hatted misfit (“Lucifer in a ten-gallon hat… dancing hula girl tattoo”) who’s almost more human than devil. The journey becomes a metaphor for grief, guilt, and the search for meaning in a broken-down Chevy of a life. That final image of hearts falling from a mysterious box and staining the sand pink in the desert? It lingers.

Gonzalez writes with a fierce rhythm that recalls the beat poets and Bukowski, but with more introspection and cultural layering. Poems like “Styx Mea” and “Somnium Supermercati” capture the push-pull between self-destruction and transcendence. In the latter, a supermarket becomes a surreal warzone of late-stage capitalism and spiritual decay — “press your soul against mine while I’m at the Supermart and feel nothing but my coat wet from toilet water from aisle 7.” It’s grotesque, hilarious, and unnervingly poignant.

The collection also shines in its cultural specificity. Gonzalez grounds many poems in the Mexican-American experience — from Progreso border town memories to Catholic schoolgirl flashbacks — without ever slipping into cliché. The language is rich with Spanglish grit, musicality, and spiritual hunger. “Progreso International Bridge” is a standout: part Kafka hallucination, part drunken prayer, it blends surrealism with raw border-town realism in a way that’s both funny and devastating.

If there’s a critique to be had, it’s that the tone can be unrelentingly intense. There are few moments of quiet or restraint — Gonzalez goes full throttle from start to finish. A bit more structural variety or room to breathe between poems might have helped the strongest pieces land with even more impact.

Still, Devil’s Roadtrip is a thrilling, unforgettable collection. It doesn’t just ask you to read — it dares you to ride shotgun. It’s not for the faint of heart, but for those who love poetry with edge, humor, and soul — this one’s for you.

Armando Gonzalez also writes fiction under the pen name, Armand Gunn. "Bank of the Dragon" is his DEBUT novel also available on Kindle and Amazon.. He has studied writing at the University of Houston and at New Mexico State. His book of collected poetry is entitled "Devil's Roadtrip" and is available on Amazon and Kindle under is real name Armando Gonzalez.

KIRKUS REVIEW

In this darkly comic debut novel, an incompetent law-school graduate gets in over his head as counsel to a bank in Houston's Chinatown. "I have no idea what I'm doing here" whispers Lazaro Mendoza to an elderly Chinese man at his new job. It's something of a theme for Lazaro, who's clueless, lazy and prone to petty theft and drunkenness. He graduated as an average student from a third-rate law school in 1996, and as he awaits the results of his bar exam, he tries to fill the position of in-house legal counsel to the Cosmopolitan Bank of the Far East. The name may sound exotic, but the bank is housed in a dismal strip mall in Houston's Chinatown, where Lazaro has to fight grocery shoppers for parking spaces. From his office window, he can see the sparkling, magnificent Enrico Tower, where his hated rival, Edmundo Vicente, now works. In school, both were members of the Latino Law Students Association; Lazaro joined just to get other students' course outlines. (Lazaro's idea of a great lawyer comes from a TV show called San Francisco Law. Enrico, an energy company with dubious business practices, bears an obvious resemblance to Enron; while showing off to Lazaro during a visit, Edmundo blithely darkens a third of California. Lazaro, meanwhile, is tasked with foreclosing on families in poverty. It eventually leads him to a difficult choice, which produces ambiguous results. The flawed and culpable Lazaro may be a difficult character for readers to spend time with, as his life is one long anxiety dream. In his unprepared desperation, he bears some resemblance to the hero of Kingsley Amis' "Lucky Jim" (1954), a much funnier and sunnier novel. The comedy gets very dark indeed, but its not quite outrageous or bitingly satirical enough to stand with the best of the genre, such as Joseph Hellers "Catch-22" (1961) or Nathanael West's "The Day of the Locust" (1939). However, Gunn does get off some pointed zingers and creates some outlandish characters, including a hunchbacked stripper, a madam/pet-shop owner, and a feng shui master, that round out the colorful cast and effectively add to the comic tone. An engaging black comedy set in the greedy mid-1990s.