Gabriel Palacios, clearly a wizard.
No question.
That's just it, bro.
Don't at me.
Palacios is a magic user capable of manipulating
the structures of reality.
Drawing in the subtle weave of language
that permeates the cosmos, wizards
cast poems of explosive fire, arcing lightning, and especially
in Palacios's case, subtle shades of deception.
Their mightiest spells change one substance into another.
Call meteors down from the sky, or open portals
to forgotten worlds.
Like Tucson's own Spanish Trail Motel,
perhaps. Wizards live and die by their poems,
everything else is secondary.
And Palacios's poems are a special kind of magic,
weaving shadow into shadow, summoning old songs,
playing in abandoned malls or half remembered, post-colonial
but not too boring about it ghosts who live in the static
after the song has faded.
His primary ability is intelligence,
with a lingering sense of sadness.
Mysterious, layered, laconic.
His spellbook, A Ten Peso Burial For Which Truth I Sign,
feels to me like a secret that could unlock the path to a power
greater than any magic available in the present age.
Which is why you should buy it and listen to him now.
Gabriel Palacios.
[APPLAUSE]