La Treintena 2021: 30 Books & Chapbooks of Latinx Poetry
Last year, in the context of cuarentena (quarantine), I shouted out a treintena, 30 recently published or forthcoming books of Latinx poetry. Well, I'm back, but this time with a few chapbooks mixed in, since several noteworthy works in this shorter format have recently appeared, and since portable and short chapbooks seem especially well suited to (safe) outdoors summer reading. Like last year, I begin with 10 microreviews of books, but this time with an additional two microreviews of chapbooks. I then add a list of 18 other titles to extend the poetic playlist and to add up to 30 on this 30th and final day of this cruelly poetic month (my birthday month, FYI). Like last year's, this list includes some familiar names and some newer ones, and it reflects a range of styles and geographies. Latinx poets continue breaking ground formally and politically in 2021, and hopefully more groundbreaking titles will achieve broader recognition, as was the case with Anthony Cody's dazzling Borderland Apocrypha, winner of several prizes and a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award. I also hope 2021 will lead to increased critical attention to Central American Latinx poets and writers, as several new titles appear and Central American Twitter and Instagram continue to flourish (the reprinting of Leticia Hernández Linares, Héctor Tobar, and Rubén Martínez's watershed anthology The Wandering Song late last year was an underrecognized literary event). Against the backdrop of a global reckoning with racial capitalism and its pandemic fault lines, in 2020 we lost Miriam Jiménez Román and Miguel Algarín, two key Afro-Puerto Rican public intellectuals and cultural workers, but we were also gifted beautiful and urgent Afro-diasporic texts such as John Murillo's Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, a PEN/Voelcker Award finalist, and Alan Pelaez Lopez's Afro-Zapotec conjuring To Love and Mourn in the Age of Displacement, and we can look forward to long-awaited first full-length poetry books by Ariana Brown (We Are Owed, Grieveland Press) and Darrel Alejandro Holnes (STEPMOTHERLAND, Notre Dame University Press, winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize), as well as a new, bilingual edition of Mayra Santos-Febres's Boat People, translated by Vanessa Pérez Rosario. Meanwhile, uptown, I was honored to write an introduction to Smoking Lovely: The Remix, Willie Perdomo's contemporary reimagining of his anti-neoliberal Nuyorican classic, and I celebrated the granting of asylum to my neighbor Marco Saavedra, the South Bronx migrant activist, artist, and poet who is one of the editors of and contributors to Eclipse of Dreams, one of my favorite reads from the past year. The work of all these brilliant folks reminds me of why we need poetry's radically generative acts of dreaming now more than ever. I conclude by echoing my insistence from last year that you consider this an invitation to put some rhythm, rhyme, and joyful resistance in your social distance, and by thanking all those courageous and brilliant poets who are writing against hegemonic Latinidad.
The Charm & The Dread. By Rodrigo Toscano. Fence Books.
The title poem of Toscano's latest collection is a covid meditation that works its way back and forth from eccentric list poem to disturbingly gorgeous (charm and dread? bare-life-by-way-of- John Cage?) process poem/chorus/prompt: "The charm of another ambulance. / The dread of a failed meditation. / The charm of a virus on your fingertip. / The dread of a failed meditation."
Intriguingly, here Toscano uses the constraint of the sonnet form to capture the tension, enclosure, and self-consciousness of our current moment, as in "Maskers," where the sonnet is invoked as a "straining against." Though Toscano's are not your "typical" sonnets, they are not the deconstructions of the form we expect from some of the experimental U.S. poetics with which he is typically associated. We get 14 lines, elegant accentual syllabics, even flickers of iambic pentameter, as in the disconcertingly pretty opening line of "Miasma:" "And suddenly, the words are gone again."
Like much of his recent poetry, this book reflects Toscano's work in the labor field and an increasing focus on environmental and health issues, evident in the acerbic diagnosis of a poem like "Feel-Serf" ("It’s full Anarcho-Tyranny, confreres / The fees on your hospital bills are tithes / To this fiefdom of privatization") and in an increasing ecopoetic charge. Something like the critique of the ecological devastation of disaster capitalism already animates Toscano's earlier book Explosion Rocks Springfield (2016), but it takes on a special poignancy here in poems about New Orleans, where Toscano has lived for several years now: "Gray birds made of marble falling from the sky / Swamp oaks taking two steps forward, if you look closely /Levee water levels rising exactly by four feet /New bridges made of glass suddenly appear over urban canals."
Beyond asking us to "ponder the squander of recourses," The Charm & The Dread urges us to understand the Pandemic and George Floyd protests as " o longer an external event, rather /
it is an interiority in search of an externality." It also continues Toscano's ongoing Chicano Marxist (cf. Alurista) critique of the "sub-sub Westphalian / fatigued nationalism" of the US and of a
Mexico
decaled with
brown lives
matter merch
donated by
happy oligarchs
of oil
of telecom
of finance
beachfront empires
foreground to
hillside slums (29).
Other poems skewer our "Globo Bobo" by asking all the right questions ("Is the U.S. a nation /
or just an economic platform?"), ironize the class privileges of "ally-ship" and the literature conference version of politics (the syllabic exercises of "Homo Americanus"), or critique the monetization of neoliberal selfhood with syllabic sinew: "They send us an invoice for self-image /We transfer currencies of disbelief." Toscano's take on our pandemic polis is often bleak ("Our allotments of failed Liberal Schemes / Coming into view as we splinter up"), but also at times funny, as in the trippy taxonomy of Zoom squares in "Zoom Reader" or a poem titled "1519 Aztec Arrivista," and also expansively speculative, as in the sonnet "Insurrectionary," which plaintively concludes "What kinds of lifeforms are we? All of us /And what’s best for each and everyone here?" There's much of Toscano's characteristic restless intellect and political acumen here, but there's also a sensuousness that's hard-earned, profound, and sustaining: a faith in a poetry that "Might suture flesh."
Floaters. By Martín Espada. Norton.
Espada's latest collection builds on Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), recasting its long, Whitmanesque lines and political expansiveness into an elegiac poetics. While Espada has long followed Neruda in crafting odes that find beauty and power in unexpected places, Floaters here turns to the elegy as a source of radical imaginations, linking various struggles from below and the personal and the political.
As noted in the book's description, Floaters "takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over," and the title poem "responds to the viral photograph of Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río Grande," yet "floaters" also suggests spots that drift across the eyes, and with them tricky questions about visibility politics and what it means to see the Other. Through the elegiac mode, Espada connects Óscar and Valeria to famed migrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, the subjects of a poem a bit later in the book, and to his own father, famed photographer and activist Frank Espada, who is memorialized in the book's closing "Letter to My Father," one of Espada's most personal and moving poems. Together, these stories imagine something like a migrant counterhistory from below.
There are also wonderfully vivid poems evoking the history of Espada's Puerto Rican Brooklyn, including the unforgettably titled "Why I Wait for the Soggy Tarantula of Spinach," as well as irreverent takes on the love poem and the aubade, and a poem called "I Would Steal a Car for You" whose lopingly lyrical confessional whimsy is reminiscent of Traffic Violations-era Pedro Pietri. Don't miss Espada's luminous elegies for two iconic New York Puerto Rican cultural and community workers, Jack Agüeros (1934-2014) and Luis Garden Acosta (1945-2019). The brilliant conclusion to the elegy for Acosta echoes Pietri's "Puerto Rican Obituary" while finding in Acosta's diasporic dreamwork something like "the republic of poetry" prefigured in Espada's Pulitzer-finalist 2006 collection of the same name: "I know you died dreaming of the poets who stank of weed in the parking lot, then stood before the mike you electrified for them and rubbed their eyes when the faces in their poems gathered there, waiting for the first word, so we could all die dreaming, morir soñando, intoxicated by the elixir of the tongue, oh rocking prophet at my table."
I Always Carry My Bones. By Felicia Zamora. University of Iowa Press.
Expanding upon the shape-shifting and ruminative embodied poetics of last year's Body of Render, Zamora's new book deftly crafts a by turns visionary and prosaic mode of lyric that can bleed into personal essay, manifesto, or scientific treatise, with prose blocks as building blocks and as living skeletons of our language of bones. Instead of taking an embodied politics for granted, Zamora explores what it means to be in a body across space and time, reflecting on everything from the "biomimicry" of Quetzalcoatl and "the migration in your belly" ("Dear Coyote") to the intricacies of collective voice: "if we fracture a system long enough / our voices build / a neoteric system / with our voices inside."
Amid all the beautifully sinuous process poetics are plenty of pieces where Zamora pulls no punches (with titles like "On the Legalization of Concentration Camps in America" and "Upon Never Meeting My Father"), and yet even these are framed by a processual critical project that insists that poetry "cannot encompass. Because we must gather voice," and that such gathering must be from the margins, like the purposeful écriture in these pages. Like the essential Ada Limón, Zamora eschews programmatic embodied politics in favor of a poetics that tasks itself with working through a tangle of bodies and voices, and the results sometimes read like (not necessarily romantic) love poems that summon a social body: "we lick / the wound of us: nation / of forgetting, nation of omission." (The book's speculative closing poem, "Game Sanctuary," has an epigraph from Limón's Sharks in the Rivers.)
Zamora does not need to write very long poems to create what feel like psychic epics, as in "Borderless Wake" with its "No borders speak me, weave me into being." There is no artificial private/public distinction here, of the kind that undergirds traditional lyric poetry and its relationship to a liberal polity; instead, we are apostrophized into these poems as we become aware of ourselves carrying our own bones, and perhaps recognize the creaking of others' bones in ours.
A line that haunts me is "Do you hear yourself being spoken into existence?"
If This Is the Age We End Discovery. By Rosebud Ben-Oni. Alice James Books.
In this unforgettable addition to the corpus of speculative Latinx poetics, Rosebud Ben-Oni writes what at times feels like a simultaneously utopian and dystopian manifesto for our time:
One day, soon, there will be no more science fiction. One
day. Everything we imagine. Is real
though not. Everything
is
a storm gathering
in the middle of nowhere (57).
For all its sci-fi imaginaries and its evocation of string theory, down to the strings of texts tangling and disentangling on the page, Ben-Oni's poetics is as old as it is new, steeped in a Jewish tradition that finds the physics in poetry and the poetry in physics. Like Ben-Oni's previous work, this book plays with self-figuration, structuring itself around the gendered figure of the poet with open-ended poem titles like “POET WRESTLING WITH THE POSSIBILITY SHE’S LIVING IN A SIMULATION," “POET WRESTLING WITH NEUTRINOS SHE {ALLEGEDLY} CANNOT FEEL,” and the previously quoted "POET WRESTLING WITH HER OWN ALONENESS IN ITS TIME OF NEED {SHE’S GOING THE DISTANCE}," that stress the book's self-reflexive narrative dimension. Ultimately, and for all its performative play, the narrative self here is checked by a poetics of Efes, which Ben-Oni notes is Modern Hebrew for “zero” but also used in mystical Jewish texts to mean “to nullify, to conceal.” Against a positivist science that purports to mastery over the world, Ben-Oni insists on a mode of poetic knowledge attuned to what is concealed and to the nullification of the master self.
Another way to think about the speculative here is as a diasporic practice (“Make me / a remote. & distant, distant / {home}”) and in terms of poems as promises, as Ben-Oni herself writes about in a personal essay built around the work of the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. The image-work of poetry here involves transmuting what we see, and it is a work borne of refusals, always beginning anew:
What you are looking at, this sort of green would-be
Katydid with dragonfly wings & limbs like a praying
Mantis. It’s incapable of anything
But beginning. It won’t sense your grief
For someone it has been. Walk away first. (42).
In place of proof, we get intersecting temporalities ("All my timelines lead to this poem") and a wonderfully eccentric (queer) vision of the poet as one "responsible for Dark Energy, vampire bunnies & insomnia; insatiable lover; enemy of mathematics & elegant equations; Creation’s Twin" who "presents Nullification properties as possible Transformation (rather than destruction) of the quantum & the 'real' worlds."
Some lines that haunt me are: "But my dear / friend, the science of survival is not a science / of discovery. & when we die, we go in / mystery.”
Ituzaingó: Exiles and Reveries / exilios y ensueños. By Florencia Milito. Nomadic Press.
Ituzaingó is a street in Milito's hometown of Rosario, Argentina, but it's also a poetic crucible for a personal and family history of persecution, survival, and exile under the shadow of state violence. As Milito notes in the introduction, the book documents her and her family's political exile, first to Venezuela and then to the US. This journey is reflected in the poems' varied geographies, from Rosario and Caracas to Los Angeles and Astoria, Queens, whose rumbling trains and mix of cultures are memorably evoked.
One fascinating aspect of the book is its bilingual presentation: Milito explains in the introduction that she wrote the poems in English but self-translated them into Spanish out of a sense of "debt" to loved ones. The translations are lovely, yet some of the most memorable moments are those seemingly untranslatable ones when we read for the indebtedness of the Spanish to the original: Aunt Mirta "living out her days under / the non-judgmental Caribbean sun" becomes Tía Mirta "viviendo sus días bajo / el impasible sol del Caribe" and I reflect on the impossible translation and its impassible languages.
In Ituzaingó, family history is inseparable from the history of dictatorship and its afterlives, and home is "a giant bonfire of my family's history" ("una hoguera gigante con la historia de mi familia"). In a poem like "CLOSE STUDY OF DETAIL IN BOSCH’S THE EARTHLY GARDEN OF DELIGHTS" ekphrasis becomes a way of speaking unspeakable violence, while in "GOLD RUSH" allusion works through the sediments of exile and empire: "The way to California / is lined with violence." In a standout poem like "Lattice" ("Entramado" in Spanish), the staggered lines evoke the titular latticework but also exile and its ruins:
those blue birds of Sor Juana’s
and the scabs of war
are home perhaps (20).
Milito's latticed poetics is beautiful yet spatially intricate, so I was fascinated by the book's inclusion of a classroom guide with poetics statements and prompts for writing about place, writing portraits, and even "EKPHRASTIC POEMS & COLOR HAIKU." It is a wonderful idea, as it works as a teaching aid but also extends the book's community-minded exilic poetics of place.
Lines I am haunted by: "I believe in lost causes and whistleblowers, / the lyric, the cobalt-blue lotus in my dream, / elusive, this persistent compass."
RoseSunWater. By Angel Dominguez. The Operating System.
In this book, "A family of immigrants moves to the valley beyond the city" ("A Cenote Blossoms in Van Nuys, CA") and "This home becomes a type of field, a portal." The home, in turn, becomes the book we are reading ("Dear Book," "Este libro es un tipo de casa"), as autobiography emerges as a queer/speculative project, perhaps akin to Gloria Anzaldúa's "autohistoria-teoría" and its embodied landscapes/cenotes/dream-pools. Dominguez writes
"Mayataan words into a somnambulist ear" that might "bloom this net of neurons."
At first, I am lost as I read, as Chaac the Mayan Rain God rubs up against a seemingly disappearing house ("Tell me about the property again" in faint font). Only later in the book does it become clear that the author, who identifies as mestizx and Yucatecan from Los Angeles, is writing against the gentrification of their city of Van Nuys, now troped through Chichén Itzá with the moving rhetorical question: "Does colonization ever end?" (59). Dominguez asks "What does it mean to write a document of light?" (42), in space shared with family and ancestors ("el Cenote eterno de nuestros sueños y ancestros") against the forces "displacing the soil with the promise of globalism" (50). On the one hand, Dominguez powerfully observes, "The city I grew up in does not exist, nor has it ever," but on the other poetry is a portal that reminds us that we don't need the state in order to dream ("no necesitamos al estado para soñar"). This is an urgent reminder (always, but especially now).
RoseSunWater includes a fascinating "Extended Colophon & Instructions for Speculative Future
Use & Production" that describes the ritual "bibliomancy" behind the book's composition and its status as a text "still in process," with possible audio and video versions forthcoming, as well as a
conversation with the author that glosses the "Cenote-form," "a living cenote of language," as in "pools and chambers of feeling, writing, thinking, and being, becoming actualized in this kind of subterranean concentration of intention and sound."
Lines I am haunted by: "I build a roof above a dream I've yet to have" and "I'm just another winged thing / Migrating back and forth / Between worlds"
Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere. By Grisel Y. Acosta. Get Fresh Books.
Chicago-born Acosta's first book of poetry reflects her multiethnic upbringing and pan-diasporic Afro-Latina geographies as well as a range of creative and critical perspectives from below,
echoing the community minded creative and critical Latina feminist vision that animates her edited volume Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity. It is a significant addition to Roberto Carlos Garcia's cooperative Get Fresh Books, which has quickly become a key publisher of emerging Latinx (and especially Afro- and queer Latinx) writing.
Remixing everyone from Lauryn Hill and La Lupe to Roxane Gay and Sonia Sotomayor, Acosta's poems are noteworthy for their range and ambition: they are "Hardcore Chica Punk Birth Fragments," DJ shoutouts, geeky meditations on subjects like the properties of argon, dystopian speculative polemics ("The Guts of a Corporation"), takedowns of the languages of whiteness ("Suburban Cavewoman," "Pity Party," "White Latinx"), sometimes as sardonic singalongs.
Many of the most powerful moments here are tied to Afro-Latinx counterhistories, whether in the form of an epic saga of the father or perfectly distilled into lyric form ("Invisible Ink" is a mini-manifesto worthy of regular anthologizing). Given the venue I'm writing for, I can't help but highlight Acosta's searing exposés of the power plays of academia in poems like "Games" and "Master of Academia," which to my mind works as a feminist response to Neruda's "Me gustas cuando callas." With its critically and creatively embodied landscapes, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere is a poetic ecology of survival and transformation.
Lines I am haunted by and for which I am ever so grateful: "But artists make beauty out of trash. / We roll in the discarded and live with its decline, / listen to it crumble and make the sound song, cradle it in our hands and sculpt it useful."
To The River, We Are Migrants. By Ayendy Bonifacio. Unsolicited Press.
In Bonifacio's debut poetry book, tongues unfurl like rivers, as the silt of bilingual English and Spanish versions becomes the ground for a sedimented diasporic memory. Evident here is the influence of Julia Álvarez and especially Rhina Espaillat, two foundational Dominican American poets whose work provides epigraphs for the book. Like these poets, Bonifacio is interested in what's lost in translation and in what remains, like the cicatrix/cicatriz of a haunted language written on the skin.
In heart-wrenching fashion, evocations of a Catholic upbringing, a dead father and a lovingly evoked grandfather all blur ("Father, I See You"/ "Padre, Te Veo"). In this book, the border is a river but also various kinds of crossing, from the passing of the father to the flow and flux of Dominicanyork geographies, from Brooklyn to the Bronx and beyond. Bonifacio has already left his imprint on Dominican American literature with the 2017 memoir Dique Dominican, yet To The River, We Are Migrant catapults him to the forefront of Caribbean Latinx poetry. Especially memorable is the vivid depiction (including interior landscapes) of growing up in East New York, a neighborhood underrepresented in New York City Latinx literature. Don't miss the fantastic introduction by poet and critic Octavio R. González, which reads Bonifacio with both complicity and judicious insight.
Lines I am haunted by:
"Here,
a tuft of
spherules
stammers
over Quisqueya."
Tropical Lung: Mitología Panameña. By Roberto Harrison. Nion Editions.
With its mixture of poetic prose, drawings, and collage, this latest installment of Harrison's ongoing, multivolume Tropical Lung series mythopoetically evokes his homeland of Panamá through a "voiceless song" (the name of its first drawing) poised between baroque plenitude and experimental erasure.
The collages here include a dizzying range of sourced materials, juxtaposing indigenous figures, texts, images, and forms with materials from everyone from Frederick Douglass and Gabriel García Márquez to James Baldwin, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Hannah Weiner. Also collaged are
personal photographs, "Doctor's Psychotherapy diagnostic transcripts and questionnaires relating to the author" and "VAX computer writing transcripts of the author from the mid 1980s."
The poetry in Tropical Lung evokes these layers of transcriptions with its dense layers of imagistic word clusters: "I am a small color of twilight and the least friend of the moon, with circular comments relaxing my face and with oceans washing my feet. my struggle for color builds swamps in a high rise and crumbles the city that calls me with stop signs." Computation is even thematized, from the start interrupting the surrealistic flow: "with the earth I am flowing with horses and stopping with mud on the river that washes my heart to belong to the songs and the beat of our heart in our Start non-computable worlds."
Harrison is well-regarded in experimental US poetry circles, and was the 2017-2019 Milwaukee Poet Laureate. With his dual practice as poet and visual artist increasingly enmeshed, many recent Harrison works read like concept books exploring the limits of the verbivocovisual, and his fusion of linguistic rigor and surrealist neobaroque vision is unique in contemporary US poetry. The next volume in the series, Tropical Lung: exi(s)t(s), featuring cover art by the author, is forthcoming with Omnidawn and should be an essential read.
Some lines that haunt me: "I am called by inanimate people and ponder their voting for Suns as I lay out the seeds for the forest of living and thought without knowing to see. the frame of their windows becomes me as glass reflects all of the ghosts of the north that won’t follow the line without water. the water is memory stored by the crucible qubit and heightened arboreal designs for the future of action."
Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018. By Daniel Borzutzky. Coffee House Press.
This book continues Borzutzky's longstanding project of counter-writing state violence across the Americas, as epitomized by his National Book Award-winning The Performance of Becoming Human (2016). In that book, the windswept expanses of neoliberal Chile and Chicago (his ancestral and adopted homes) were reimagined from below, in the spirit of hemispheric insurrection.
Here, Borzutzky takes a different tack. As Borzutzky notes in a stunning "End Note" that functions as a poetic essay or coda to the book, the titular massacre is the October 27, 2018, killing of eleven people and wounding of six at the Tree of Life synagogue in his native Pittsburgh. Borzutzky grew up within attending the synagogue, which was within walking distance of the house where his family still lives, and he knows some of the people who were killed. Yet the Tree of Life massacre is not mentioned elsewhere in the book, with Borzutzky noting: "I have thought quite a bit about whether or not to mention the shooting in this book. And given the number of mass shootings and white-supremacist killings, I don’t want to give the impression that I think one attack is more significant than another."
The effect of this decision is to emphasize the book's function as a meditation on the unsayable in the context of what Borzutzky here and elsewhere calls "the carcass economy" ("I can’t find my brain in the dark / the carcass economy sustains me in the privatized darkness of dark"). The dead are "Disappeared into the chemical blankness" (8) of our ecocidal capitalism, and we are left to make do with a "Managed Diversity" (the title of book's opening poem, which begins with the startling phrase "Through predictive analytics I understood the inevitability of the caged-up babies").
The performative impulse here involves tearing down the white supremacist walls inasmuch as "We break the fourth wall," perhaps by assuming the voice of the president of the World Bank, or by singing a "Shithole Song" or managing to "Take a Body and Replace It with Another Body" and then replacing words in poems in a spectral logic of prompts and substitution. It is as if only by fully internalizing the violence of the state can we exorcise it: "And I will be a broken mouth / Or a broken body in the shithole fantasy of the shithole solitude of the exploding shithole nation." Only then can we be broken down enough to notice that
The children in the kill line are praying
Let our love be our love
Let our flesh be our flesh
Let us grow
Let us breathe
Let us stay (76).
With its long, largely punctuation-less lines and chunks of text, Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 forces us to approach these bodies relationally, confronting these countless instances of state violence without stopping to consider whether "one attack is more significant than another." Repetition is another way this is accomplished, as the title phrase and others such as "The Murmuring Grief of the Americas" recur as lines and poem titles, reinforcing the feeling of modular terror, as in nonstop social media status updates to keep up with the endless violence. Global capitalist ironies become punchlines ("there is a mood of deregulation among the lovers" and "should I strengthen my portfolio or should I destroy the nation-state") but also give way to protests, from Chile to Chicago and beyond.
Lines not to miss:
"How do you quantify
the murmuring grief of the Americas?
12. Marines medicate mothers and mix their milk with
mononucleosis. Millionaires multiply
in the machinery of mourning, manufacturing
mausoleums for martyred Marxists in Mercedes.
Middle managers mistake manipulative
merchants for munificent moralists. A military
massacre on the municipal motorway is like
a military massacre on the municipal motorway.
Metaphysical mayors mediate the mythology
of mystical markets while monitoring the murders of migrants."
Lineage of Rain. By Janel Pineda. Haymarket Books.
One of the most exciting emerging Central American poets, the Los Angeles-born Salvadoran Pineda is also a powerful performer of her poetry. Lineage of Rain finds in the rain of El Salvador a counterhistory of "women who have survived" and connects "a country / too small to stand / out on the map" to stories and songs "further up / the continent," including the "ay so sori's" of a grandmother's Spanglish and the sweat of an eldest daughter. From the violence of patriarchy and "War. Migration. Diaspora" to the death squads that remind the speaker that "To ask your name is to ask your life. You do not have another's to borrow," Pineda documents a traumatic history but also imagines a "future worthy of our joy" and claims for poetry the power to transform "this language / once monstruous / made wholly / my own." Don't miss the satirical "Fellowship Application," which includes criteria such as "Ability to be Tokenized" and "Strength of Migrant Mentality" and urges the applicant to "Recite your trauma in iambic pentameter / then pirouette back into palatable prose" (25).
Lines that echo in me:
"I dizzied myself in this winding river made its waters the
language I tell stories in"
Migrant Psalms. By Darrel Alejandro Holnes. Northwestern University Press.
The beautiful and irreverent psalms in Afro-Panamanian poet and playwright Holnes's debut chapbook perform a fierce and smart queer migrant poetics that resists "Naturalization" (the title of one of its most memorable poems) and that speak to the complexities of queer diasporic digital life.
As Ed Roberson notes in his excellent introduction, Holnes has lived around the world, from his native Panamá to New Orleans and Houston to Europe and now New York, and his poetry reflects his quest for his own migrant forms. Holnes's psalms can be both lyrical and irony-laced. They can investigate "poder" (as in power and as in I can) "away from the word being just rhetoric, into the structure of its design." They can ironize Barack Obama with a "Well, maybe he's come for all us immigrants" and still insist on a concluding Amen. The exploration of what Judith Butler calls the "psychic life of power" extends here into the tricky intersections of sex and race. In one scene (the theatrical framing is evident and very skilled) a narrator who hasn't come out to his mother yet and is dating a white man roleplays the role of cop with his lover, reflecting on the complex "allegiances" of sex, love, and citizenship. A migrant politics here is about radical imagination, beyond liberal respectability:
I'm talking about my wanting to get inside an American
like drugs do, so deep I can't be
deported (10).
Given the historic associations of the queer (and the Black) with the unnatural and the migrant with the possibility of naturalization, it makes sense to think of Holnes's poetics in terms of the defiantly unnatural. "OTM, or Other Than Mexican" deconstructs the ICE term "Other Than Mexican" through language play that affirms the radically unincorporable Other: "Other than nosotros / They me." "Amending wall" reimagines or amends Robert Frost (author of the classic poem "Mending Wall") through a performative interrogation of the "White man" (quotes in original) that concludes that "life, country, and their borders / ain't nothing but a thing." Elsewhere, Holnes reflects on the ironies of the "thirst for a white man" in the age of MAGA and meditates on queer migrant life post-Grindr and Instagram: "Maybe out there, the social-media me / has found the perfect digital mate" or
But maybe in flesh, I am already an avatar
of my ancestors, a great ancient ghost
caught in a new skin, caught in a smart phone (29).
This is an impressive and memorable debut, and I look forward to reading Holnes's forthcoming full-length book.
Further Reading:
A Camera Obscura. By Carl Marcum. Red Hen Press.
American Quasar. By David Campos & Maceo Montoya. Red Hen Press.
Autopsy of a Fall. By Eric Morales-Franceschini. Newfound.
The Best Prey. By Paige Quiñones. Pleiades Press.
Everyday We Get More Illegal. By Juan Felipe Herrera. City Lights.
Flower Grand First. By Gustavo Hernandez. Moon Tide Press.
The Foreigner's Song: New and Selected Poems. By Pablo Medina. Tiger Bark Press.
Gentefication. By Antonio López. Four Way Books.
I Have No Ocean. By Nicole Arocho Hernández. Sundress Publications.
The Painted Bunting's Last Molt. By Virgil Suárez. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Piñata Theory. By Alan Chazaro. Black Lawrence Press.
The Poem That Never Ends. By Silvina López Medin. Essay Press.
Sulphurtongue. By Rebecca Salazar. Penguin Random House Canada.
The Things We Bring with Us: Travel Poems. By S.G. Huerta. Headmistress Press.
Third Winter in our Second Country. By Andres Rojas. Trio House Press.
Tropical Sacrifice. By Lucas de Lima. Birds LLC.
The Vault. By Andrés Cerpa. Alice James Books.
x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación . poems for the nation. By Raquel Salas Rivera. University of Arizona Press.
Urayoán Noel is an associate professor of English and Spanish and Portuguese at NYU and serves on the Latinx Project Faculty Board. His most recent book of poetry is Transversal (University of Arizona Press).