Cutting the Wire

Photographs and Poetry from the US-Mexico Border

By Bruce Berman, Ray Gonzalez and Lawrence Welsh
Edited by Lisa McNiel
Published by UNM Press
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

About The Book

Cutting the Wire, a masterful collaboration between photographer Bruce Berman and poets Ray Gonzalez and Lawrence Welsh, offers us a way to look again, to really look, at the border between Mexico and the United States. Berman, who has photographed and lived in El Paso for decades, is a documentarian who uses his camera to record what’s in front of him rather than for, as he puts it, “mere self-expression.” Berman’s visual investigations of the everyday realities of the border—detention centers, smeltertown cemeteries, kids playing along a river levee, descanso crosses on telephone poles for the disappeared—are exactly the stuff the poetry of Gonzalez and Welsh is made of. The multilayered histories of the border landscape provide an inexhaustible supply of rich and fertile raw material for both Gonzalez and Welsh. But their poetic visions allow them to capture elements of a personal and collective past that historians have often failed to record.

About The Authors

Bruce Berman

Bruce Berman is an associate professor of photojournalism at New Mexico State University and has been a working photojournalist for national and international publications since the late 1960s. For the past thirty-five years his work has concentrated on the borderlands area that encompasses El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico.

Ray Gonzalez

Ray Gonzalez is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Feel Puma: Poems (UNM Press), The Heat of Arrivals, The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande, and Soul Over Lightning. He is the recipient of many awards, including the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Book Award, the Latino Heritage Award, and the Minnesota Book Award. He lives in Farmington, Minnesota, and is a professor emeritus of literature and creative writing at the University of Minnesota.

Lawrence Welsh

Lawrence Welsh is a professor of English at El Paso Community College. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including the award-winning Begging for Vultures: New and Selected Poems, 1994-2009 (UNM Press). An award-winning journalist and essayist, his work has appeared in more than two hundred national and regional publications.

Product Details

  • Publisher: UNM Press (October 15, 2018)
  • Length: 136 pages
  • ISBN13: 9780826359018

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Raves and Reviews

Cuts past polemics to deliver a striking view of life on both sides of the border. . . . Berman's photography displays impressive range, from candid slice-of-life shots to almost surreal collisions of landscape and human-made objects.
--Foreword Reviews

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Cutting the Wire

Photographs and Poetry from the US-Mexico Border

By Bruce Berman, Ray Gonzalez and Lawrence Welsh
Edited by Lisa McNiel
Published by UNM Press
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
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