“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
“Photographer Bruce Berman frees the Borderlands from its stereotype as a place where barbed-wire-topped walls loom over the poor and desperate, revealing a more complete reality where ordinary people experience the banalities, triumphs, and fragility of life.”—High Country News
“Two poets and a photojournalist capture the complexity, desolation, and richness of the borderlands in this melding of literature with visual art. . . . The work is an organically cohesive, gritty, rich, revealing, transcendent portrait of the borderlands.”—Southwest Books of the Year
“Both the photographs and the poems in Cutting the Wire blow me away. They create a complex depiction of life on the border between the US and Mexico, the beauty and riches of the people and the landscape. These are real places, real people, real images brilliantly portrayed in photos and words. A lot of artists just don’t ‘get it’ when it comes to understanding the borderlands, so it's refreshing to see a representation of our region from people who know what life is like here, artists who call the border their home. This is a book about my home, a book I want in my home.”—Daniel Chacón, author of Hotel Juárez: Stories, Rooms and Loops
“In one of the most polarized periods in the history of the US and Mexico, Cutting the Wire creates a complex, powerful conversation between poetic and photographic image. In a world that historians rarely see, both the poets and photographer capture the unflinching truth that the ‘Mexican border is a line / between faith and its sharpest point—’ This is a brilliant, important book that arrives at just the right historical moment.”—Lex Williford, author of Superman on the Roof
“Berman, Gonzalez, and Welsh give us a book of photography and poetry on the border and about borders. But this is no mere book about borders. Cutting the Wire invites readers to participate in border crossing, asking us to make connections between seemingly separate photos and poems, between the distinct styles of the two poets, and between the private spaces the poems and photos evoke in us. This is a book to be savored and passed among family and friends, now and for some time to come.”—George Kalamaras, author of Kingdom of Throat-Stuck Luck
