‘La Treintena’ 2023: 30 (Something) Books of Latinx Poetry
Over the past year, Latina/o/x poets spanning vast aesthetics, experiences, and geographies have dazzled me with collections that reveal the complexity and beauty of our communities in all their irreducible differences. A few books by Latina/o/x poets have garnered significant mainstream attention, including Cynthia Cruz’s darkly beautiful Hotel Oblivion, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Javier Zamora’s unforgettable memoir Solito. Still, Latina/o/x poets remain frustratingly marginal to the critical conversation even in the realm of literary studies, to say nothing of our broader field or beyond it. This time around, I was excited to come across a wide range of powerful new work from Central and South American poets, further challenging and complicating the entrenched canons of Latinidad. I was also inspired by established poets such as Virgil Suárez and Jennif(f)er Tamayo opting to self-publish books and challenge literary and political conventions, and conversely by a previously self-published poet, Mercy Tullis-Bukhari, now published by the indefatigable Roberto Carlos García and his Get Fresh Books, already an essential venue for New York City Latina/o/x writing. 2022-2023 witnessed the return of foundational poets (Victor Hernández Cruz, Juan Felipe Herrera, and others), noteworthy collections by Afro-Latina voices (Tullis-Bukhari, Jasminne Mendez, Yesenia Montilla, Kimberly Reyes, etc.), and a continued flourishing of queer writing, including a volume of new and selected poems from the irreplaceable Rigoberto González, and ambitious collections by Tamayo, Christina Olivares, Lucas de Lima, Aldo Amparán, Christopher Soto, Kenneth Reveiz, and others. Below are 21 microreviews along with an additional 11 titles at the end. A special shoutout goes to the editors, publishers, and poets of the groundbreaking La piel del arrecife: Antología de poesía trans puertorriqueña, which reminds me that the work we do can imagine and build new worlds, challenging me while modeling an embodied counter-practice of creativity, criticality, and mutual care.
AKRÍLICA. By Juan Felipe Herrera. Edited by Farid Matuk, Carmen Giménez, and Anthony Cody. Noemi Press. Translated individually and collectively by the author, Farid Matuk, Carmen Giménez, J. Michael Martinez, Rosa Alcalá, Suzi F. Garcia, and hanta t. samsa. Noemi Press.
First published as a bilingual edition in the 1980s, with texts dating back to 1977, the long out-of-print AKRÍLICA harks back to the sense of possibility that characterized the Chicano Movement, including the freedom to write experimentally in Spanish, and it reveals the influence of fellow Chicanx poets who wrote in Spanish, such as Lucha Corpi and Herrera’s collaborator, the late Francisco X. Alarcón. At the same time, it is hard to minimize the visual and semantic eccentricity of AKRÍLICA, with its fragments, prose blocks, lists, repetitions, and concrete experiments alongside its thicket of language in constant interplay with the visual arts (serigraphy, watercolor, the titular acrylic). It is a document of its time: the political situation in that Central America looms large, and there is a choreopoem that reimagines Ntozake Shange’s embodied diasporic form into metal scraps in a city destroyed by nuclear war. This gorgeous edition goes beyond archival recovery and toward daring transcreation: it includes more recent photos and artwork by Herrera as well as more traditional and experimental translations by a range of younger writers who insist on and celebrate the radical plurality of Herrera’s work and its resistance to programmatic meaning. Read against the backdrop of Herrera’s stunning post-2000 work (including many of his strongest and strangest works), AKRÍLICA is a much-needed testament to the courageous noise and beauty of his and our becoming. Also, given Herrera’s recent prominence as a visual artist, AKRÍLICA can be treated and exhibited as an artist book, potentially alongside the likes of N.H. Pritchard’s The Matrix, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, and the object books of Pedro Pietri, as foundational counter-texts for the spaces ethnic studies/movements have built and are still building. Shout-out to the long piece “GRÁFIKA,” a brilliantly wide-ranging concrete poem/manifesto of anti-imperial form that acknowledges the fragility of art and the body yet reads like a secret missive: from Movimiento-era San Francisco through El Salvador and toward the dissolution of colonial language where the crimes of empire are laid bare and a new multiplicity becomes possible. Lines to linger with:
“Yo corto / / / / /
Multiplico las imágenes cotidianas. Les aplico una punta de aluminio.
Al paisaje.
A la frase.
A la foto.
A la figura.
A la palabra.
Y de repente, con un pequeño sismo de ojos, espinazo y dedos, destrozo todo lo que existe.”
Amerikan Chernobyl. By Virgil Suárez. Q-ZINE/Contagioso Press.
Cuban American poet and novelist Suárez has long been a moving chronicler of displacement and painter of memory in works full of vivid imagery. This latest, self-published collection combines poems and images—his own photographs, paintings, mixed media pieces—with raw, shape-shifting text (couplets, tercets, quatrains, poetic prose) in a collage aesthetic that stresses shadows, abstraction, and metonymy without sacrificing narrative threads. With the Chernobyl disaster and the Cold War-era in the backdrop (heavy stuff for a writer whose worked has always insisted on a complicated Cubanidad), Suárez has created a contemporary sketchbook of “daily exercises” that tackle the poetics and politics of ruin from the vantage point of the U.S. and his home state of Florida’s troubled political landscape, while reflecting on the ecologies of terror, finding dignity in migrant struggle, and making room for the big-hearted music of our irrepressible Caribes. In my blurb, I called it “Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska as played by Ernesto Lecuona,” but with the book in my hand I am struck by how the pandemic road trip in these pages is uneasily contained by its oversized materiality. This reads like an artist book for a future museum dedicated to finding beauty in “the grungy textures of things.”
banana [ ]. By Paul Hlava Ceballos. University of Pittsburgh Press.
In this debut collection, winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, California-raised and Seattle-based Ecuadorian American poet Hlava Ceballos experiments with free-verse sonnets and décimas and with erasures and fragments that bring together a range of migrant histories. The long “Banana [ ]: A History of the Americas” is a “collage of historical texts,” including an INS form, that evokes the later work of Juan Felipe Herrera, down to the tension between the (anti)documentary cross-media impulse and the humorous bursts of language laced with political ironies, as in the endless repetition of the title word in a recursive loop:
“young
banana plant” / purchased
by banana transnationals.”
Some of my favorite moments are near the end of the book, where the formal propulsion is matched by moments of somatic vulnerability: “I learn geography is deep in the pores.”
bruise/bruise/break. By Jennif(f)er Tamayo.
The queer, formerly undocumented Tamayo is groundbreaking for their innovations as a poet, performer, and digital/social media artist, but also for their radical queer migrant poetics and their long-running critiques of hegemonic whiteness, whether that of Latinidad or of the poetry world. At a time when fellow Colombian American poets are slowly reaching a wider audience, Tamayo has opted to self-publish a short electronic collection (available for purchase as a pdf) that serves as a reckoning with our post-2020 moment and an attempt to imagine a praxis and existence outside the institution. With their characteristically fragmentary and raw aesthetic (reminiscent of queer punk and internet meme culture), bruise/bruise/break gutsily reflects on how “Institutional critique won’t get you a job,” in conversation with everyone from Fred Moten to Alan Pelaez Lopez (it includes a micro-essay/blurb on Pelaez Lopez’s first full-length collection, Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien, featured in the inaugural La Treintena in 2020). The disarming lyric essay “i came the way the birds came” tells a queer tale of how the path the speaker and their mother “took from Colombia through Mexico and into the U.S. follows the Mississippi River Flyway - a migratory route famous for its lush deltas, rivers and marshes” and brilliantly connects it to a reflection on how “non-Black, non-Indigenous migrants like me and my mother bring with us […] our selective colonial memories, our bootstrap habits, our antiBlackness; whether we like it or not, our crossing bodies participate in the process of settlement on both sides of this river.” Later, the collection uses all-caps text in something like what my colleague Emily Apter calls “Netlish,” to confront “THE WHITE(NED) WORLD”:
“WHEN YOU GROW UP OUTSIDE YOUR BURTHLND YOU ARE A SECRETE TO URSELF & YOUR MOTHER TWONGUES & WHEN YOU TRY TO TALK IT’S A MOUTHFUL OF COLONIAL EMBERS GLOWING”.
At heart, the paradox here is the one Tamayo lucidly frames at the start, that “our settler State has, since its origins, dreamed up poetry where Black (and)* Native peoples would stop interrupting its conquest – all under the performative guise of self-hood, innovation and the liberal cause. Poetry’s power is that it disguises the violence.” So, one answer, for Tamayo, appears to be to dismantle the institutional practice of poetry as complicit with what Aimé Césaire famously called the “colonial forgetting machine.” This is difficult reading, but it also insists on the polymorphously perverse, hard-won joy to self-publish, to make poems that read like failed Instagram viral posts, like sloppy memes, like abject selfies, as if to gum up the respectability machines of white settler Latinidad and let something else be (and come).
Cenizas. By Cynthia Guardado. University of Arizona Press.
Born and raised in Los Angeles of Salvadoran descent, Guardado writes movingly of the complexities of return to the homeland as a diasporic subject, a child of immigrants haunted by imperialism and the legacies of its Civil War. Some of the most powerful moments are in the numbered “Call Me Refugee” poems interspersed throughout the book, including when, in the jarringly bilingual “Call Me Refugee VI,” the speaker connects the War in Afghanistan to the history of US intervention in El Salvador:
“el capucho es
una oscuridad
eterna
como la humedad
de un cantón
these
torture displays
replay (1980)
decades apart
half way
across the world”
I loved how the piece “Diaspora” uses poetic prose to distill complex thoughts on diasporic space and time: “War erased the time line we were meant to be born with, & in it we emerged (refugees in the in-between).”
City Without Altar. By Jasmine Mendez. Noemi Press.
In this latest book from the Houston-based Mendez, a key figure of both Afro-Dominicana and Latinx disability literature, x-rays of chronic pain, disability, and survival under the medical industrial complex frame the author’s exploration of the Haitian Massacre of 1937 and its traumatic aftermath. With its acts and scenes and dramaturgical notes, City Without Altar scripts, crypts, and scores a transnational counternarrative to the anti-Black state (where the Dominican Republic meets the United States?) while seeking to make room for genealogies of motherhood that do not simply reproduce its ableist violence. Don’t miss the meditation on scleroderma in “INTERLUDE” that ends with “But what happens when the body attacks itself? How do you heal when you are the weapon and the wound?”
Future Botanic. By Christina Olivares. Get Fresh Books.
With its attention to the ecologies of language (“For the seeds we are, fed on dreaming”), Olivares’s follow-up to her luminous 2014 full-length debut No Map of the Earth Includes Stars raises the queer diasporic stakes, tracing the ancestral journey from Cuba to Harlem while taking us back to a Bronx housing project, to the touch of a lover’s hand, to how nested desire and death are in what the poet calls this “no-américa” we inhabit. The restless and genderless mind here by turns compresses and releases, in spare prose, unspooled tercets, and gorgeous fossilized fragments, as it rejects facile embodiment in order to name the sediment (sed y mente) we are and are from—I can’t help but think of Sylvia Wynter’s autopoiesis (the neuro-semantic fragments of our experience). In a blurb for the book, I called it “a dissident queer love song to ‘this dirt of the américas,’” but upon rereading, it hits hardest from the hard-won wisdom of a working-class Bronx Cubanidad that dreams us (with José Esteban Muñoz) into the spirit botánica, the here and now of queer futurity.
Guayacán. By Victor Hernández Cruz. Ishmael Reed Publishing Company.
After almost 30 years with Coffee House Press, with whom he made the leap from the countercultural vanguard to the peripheries of the literary mainstream (Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, etc.), the eternally nomadic and visionary poet of glocal souths (New York-Puerto Rico-Morocco) is once again reunited with Ishmael Reed, who co-published Tropicalization (1976), a book so far ahead of it time that we’re still figuring out how to read it, and that would usher in a decade of even more daring Hernández Cruzian experiments. While Guayacán is comparatively quieter, as is much of the poet’s work these days, his tropicalizing twists here have the strength and proud, knotty rootedness of the indigenous guayacán tree, whose name and legend lead us back to Taíno counter-histories, allowing for the Spanglish (as sinuous and virtuosic as ever) to uproot hegemonic English and Spanish from the personal and collective body. Plus, as always, when Hernández Cruz writes about music and musicians (including, here, the Catalan/Puerto Rican cellist Pablo Casals and the Afro-Cuban trumpeter Chocolate Armenteros), we reach the synaesthetic realms of the griot as the pages syncopate, sing, sweat, and swing:
“Pero Chocolate is the flavor
Cadence of the Caribbean
Africa such is tempo,
Movement fingers knuckles
Palm tongue on metal,
Moist blow like Wifredo Lam painter brush melody,
With your metal of Ogun”
The Little Deaths. By Mercy Tullis-Bukhari. Get Fresh Books.
This collection by a self-identified “Bronx-bred Afro-Latina American, Honduran, and Garifuna of Jamaican descent” teems with memories and stories of the Bronx, from early school days to love, sex, and family. It also touches upon the return to Honduras, gender roles (“The Heeled Journey”), and self-love (the memorable “Masturbation with THAT Magazine,” subtitled “My Love Letter to Prince”), and it candidly confronts aging in poems such as “Gray Pubic Hair”, “First Mammogram,” and the short and humorous “On Aging.” As the collection progresses, the body’s confrontation with mortality effectively blurs with many little and not-so-little deaths, from the harrowing “DIY: How to Commit a Murder-Suicide While Daughter is in the Apartment” to a series of moving brother poems that conclude the book, including the painfully self-scrutinizing “Dear Brother,” the evocative “Rollerskating with Jesus on the Grand Concourse,” and the poetic prose finale “My Brother’s Keeper,” which attests to Tullis-Bukhari’s power as a storyteller.
Lotería: Sorteo Nocturno / The Lottery: Nocturnal Sweepstakes. By Elizabeth Torres. University of Arizona Press.
This book won the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish. The New York-based Colombian American Torres incorporates her own artwork and, most impressively, elegant self-translations that let her flowing lyric voice unfold in both languages, touching upon migration, war, memory, and landscape, from the natural world rendered in visionary lines to the physical and psychic environments of everyday New York City. The passage below is one of my favorites:
“EL ESTADO DE LAS COSAS
He aquí la línea fronteriza:
la raya en vertical donde cruzamos hacia el fin del mundo.
De ahora en adelante una brusca neblina
carcomiendo las secuencias de cada instante nuestro
rabia en los huesos / un rogar incesante por máquinas del tiempo.
STATE OF AFFAIRS
This is the borderline:
the vertical stripe where we cross to the end of the world.
From now on an abrupt haze
gnawing at the sequences of each instant of ours
rage in the bones / an incessant begging for time machines.”
Muse Found in a Colonized Body. By Yesenia Montilla. Four Way Books.
Montilla’s long-awaited follow up to her 2015 debut The Pink Box consolidates her place as a key Afro-Latina and Caribbean New York City voice. The opening prose poem—part of the title sequence spread throughout the book—begins “They say when the Spaniards came we thought them gods,” and the book goes on from there to interrogate colonial violence and silences from and beyond the body. “La Bodega—A Gentrification Story” puts a Caribe face to the New York City gentrification poem, its pain at once indigenous and diasporic, and the book deftly translates NYC “columbusing” into broader histories of “colón-ization.” Perhaps most memorable is the way critiques of racism and colonialism are intertwined with explorations of gendered sexuality and desire in poems that invoke everyone from Eartha Kitt to Sylvia Plath. One choice cut is “Gut Gravity,” which plays with colonialism, colonoscopies, and the colon as punctuation mark in ways that don’t just bemuse or amuse but set the freak muse free.
Nerve Curriculum. By Manuel Paul Lopez. Futurepoem Books.
This book begins with a burst of translingual noise (echoing PJ Harvey) and from there flows into a fragmentary écriture that has something of the rigor and clarity of the conceptual, not afraid of repetition or abstraction. Whereas some of Lopez’s other work has more transparently evoked the San Diego and Imperial Valley borderlands he is rooted in, here the memory of youth and the constitution of selfhood are fascinatingly worked through the speaker’s cousin/neighbor/alter ego, the “Chicano goth” Nestor. Along the way, the book pings with references to everyone from Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi to John Yau, Kenneth Koch, José Olivarez, Jack Hirschman, and Zora Neale Hurston, and to the alternative curricula of Wikipedia and YouTube. Don’t miss the beautiful abjection of “Bird Brain,” the last couplet of which contains its own kind of wisdom: “Of all the rain falling on this planet I’ve somehow attracted / the neon spacey kind that governs like a syllabus of smoke.”
La piel del arrecife: Antología de poesía trans puertorriqueña. Edited by Raquel Albarrán, Val Arboniés Flores, and Roque Raquel Salas Rivera. La Impresora.
Editors Arboniés Flores, Salas Rivera, and the late Albarrán have done sustaining work with this groundbreaking anthology of Trans Puerto Rican poetry that brings together an impressive and necessary range of Englishes, Spanishes, and Spanglishes. It is compelling to read up-and-coming (Salomé Jüey Marejada, üatibirí, Fabo E. Feliciano Graniela) and more established (Kelly Daniel Díaz, Pó Rodil) Trans poets and artists from the archipelago alongside more visible (Oliver Baez Bendorf) and emerging (Isa Anastasia Rivas) poets of the Puerto Rican diaspora making their first appearances in print in Puerto Rico. I was excited by the work of Black and Afro-identified poets such as Gabi Grace and RJ Robles, and I was impressed by the editors’ introduction, which brilliantly frames the anthology as an archive of the Trans biosphere (UN ARCHIVO DE LA BIÓSFERA TRANS), articulating a sophisticated ecology of Trans survival and healing in the context of historical and ongoing environmental and colonial violence. The titular coral’s skin thus alludes to the precarity of Trans life but also to its centrality to a better future for Trans and cis allies alike. Avoiding strict chronologies and categorizations, the editors let allusive section titles like the hard-to-translate “ORILLA TUPIDA” (overgrown seashore?) and “VEGETANIMAL” linger in a quasi-Glissantian opacity that resists uprooting language from its referential archipelago, as poems play off and with each other in ways that highlight continuities and differences. Thanks must also go to the essential Isabela-based, activist Risograph publisher La Impresora—already home to numerous queer writers (myself included)—for the beautiful edition and for making this essential anthology available on their website. A number of poets included have few, if any, previous publication credits, making this all the more impressive as a labor of love and community.
Relinquenda. By Alexandra Lytton Regalado. Beacon Press.
This National Poetry Series selection ranges from taut poems about motherhood and marriage (including the unforgettably titled “Do You Know How Ugly You Are to Me Right Now?”) to textured experimental writing rooted in and complicating Salvadorian/American experiences. Some standouts are the concrete “Caracol,” the visionary, Andrés Montoya-inspired “Turning the Stone, Contrapuntal,” and the searing “Pentimento,” for the disappeared women of El Salvador. One of my favorites is the translingual “I Prided Myself on Being Aguantadora,” with its tricky enjambments, double slashes, code switches, and pronoun shifts, by turns collapsing and compressing into song, as in the passage below:
“Al extender, I hear my name. I hear
Often: “He llorado lo que no está escrito,” & I hold // my shoulder firm
Against the surge. A hammer // to a finger reveals our mother // tongue; we say
Ow // or ay & silently we count with our lips // in our language cut
With the deepest grooves. Pain as something we need to cross, // a threshold
We move through”
The Rendering. By Anthony Cody. Omnidawn Publishing.
In the follow-up to his transcendent and widely celebrated 2020 debut Borderland Apocrypha, Cody builds on the shapeshifting “snake poems” of the late Francisco X. Alarcón and arrives at a digital “dust bowl” poetics reflecting the author’s mixed Anglo and Chicano heritage. The dazzling graphic and concrete sensibility of Borderland Apocrypha remains, yet here Cody intervenes upon photos, maps, charts, graphs, and field recordings, producing an autoethnographic score of settler (and displaced) histories. Dorothea Lange’s striking photos of migrant Fresno (Cody’s hometown) are counter-captioned and juxtaposed against lines and fragments such as “I / am learning to understand the nature of this displacement,” “I am the punctum of revision,” and “All the maps are downloaded, rated, ranked, updated, and discontinued. / The maps are translated into multiple languages.” Internet searches fuse with data about land, megadroughts, and climate change, in a mise en abyme of extraction, and Cody uses design software and concrete sensibility to dust or sediment the page with dissonant rhythms, erasures, and upside-down text, in conversation with poets such as Douglas Kearney, Edwin Torres, and N.H. Pritchard. As if interrogating the settler whiteness of witness, pages here are soil samples and a file is an extension of landfill. Check out the digital dreamscape of “Piso de Piedra,” the Chicanx digital baroque of “Analog Jaguar Digitalization Forest Canopy,” and the searing narrative seriality of the “Everywhere I sleep, I see Dust Bowl” sequence at the heart of the book. The lines buzzing through me are: “The Basilica of Dust settles / but does not open its doors.”
Some of the Light: New and Selected Poems. By Tim Z. Hernandez. Beacon Press.
Much of the light here comes from the third-person self-portraits, dated texts that read like diary entries, and winding long poems that echo the lyric expanse and vision of Hernandez’s celebrated novels and historical fiction. These poems confront single-parenting, vulnerability, and heartbreak, but they also center landscapes or morph into a series of “refractions” where I, you, we, and they all blur. Some highlights include “Unqualified Poem,” which addresses the detention of migrant children with all the fury of Amiri Baraka, the fading font of “Brown Lotus (A Performance)” and its linguistic borderlands, a piece made up of irreverent variations on Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” and the ecopoetic masterpiece “Culture of Flow,” which engages John Muir and the author’s native San Joaquin Valley in a meditation on the future of water, global diasporas, and the displacement of self and community in Anthropocene times (“Proof is in the detritus”). Also intriguing is the concluding “Skin Tax” section, where a sometimes fraught masculinity meets a deep spiritual hunger. Finally, there is “San Joaquin Sutra,” which counters Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra” with a sense of poetry’s inexhaustible speculative possibilities, returning us to and yet defamiliarizing what Gary Soto called “the elements of San Joaquin”:
“What galaxies in the mollusk?
Whose bell in the pelvis?
Do crucifixes exclude?
What irrigation of blood?
Does a fig weep in open air?
Does water discriminate?
What of sirens?
How do we count the invisible?
Can angels scale border walls?
Who will open the gates for them?
Who denies them?
What manner of love is this?”
To the Boy Who Was Night: Poems: Selected and New. By Rigoberto González. Four Way Books.
González has long been a key figure in the Latinx literary landscape, whether through his service work (National Book Critics Circle, Poets & Writers, critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times, various literary series editorships, etc.), his books of criticism and edited collections, and his formal and informal mentorship of Latinx writers, including as professor and chair of the MFA in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark, which has nurtured important Latinx literary voices over the past decade. Granted all this productivity (and his memoirs, books of fiction, and bilingual children’s books), González is a poet first, as evidenced by this volume of selected and new poems that spans from his 1999 debut So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks to our pandemic moment. González has always been a poet of the unflinching, but over the years he has refined the ability to go to difficult places in his work, writing luminously and with unabashed clarity about loss and trauma without surrendering humor or a queer sense of irony. Noteworthy in this regard are newer and uncollected poems such as “My College Boyfriend Asks Me Why I Kiss with My Eyes Open,” “Your Darling Matricide” (the title says it all!), and “Our Lady of the Wound,” tercets dedicated to the late poet Ai (another unflinching investigator of the unsayable), proclaiming “Our Lady of the Wound will not / mirror your pain.” One of the great revelations of this collection is González’s newer poetry in Spanish, where his typically meticulous sense of word-image extends into necropoetic investigations, including “Las malditas flores de tu despedida,” a wrenching elegy for the dead mother, and “Siento,” a cento for his mentor, the late Francisco X. Alarcón, the foundational gay Chicano poet to whom the book is dedicated. One of the most moving aspects of the book is tracing Alarcón’s influence and González’s conversation with his mentor from their earliest days to the present, when Alarcón is no longer with us in the flesh and González is now the mentor to so many. Like Alarcón, who wrote in Spanish, English, and Nahuatl, González is also of indigenous Mexican ancestry (Purépecha, in González’s case), and it is striking to witness this book’s ending as it points toward a queer Indigenous future. I’m thinking of the prose poem “Cómo llegar al panteón de Tzintzuntzan,” which summons unconquerable ancestors in ways Alarcón would likely appreciate, and ends with a Purépecha affirmation of song against patriarchal settler histories.
The necropoetic dimension here extends into migrant lyrics, as González, having crossed the border himself and written about it in his early work, now leads us toward the “Cage” where unaccompanied migrant children are held, but also toward the fugitive “Afterdeath” where another life is possible. As a survivor many times over, González is especially at ease in writing about and from our pandemic time (check out the humorously monorhyming tercets of “Pandemic, Mon Amour”) and about chronic illness (“On the Sickbed, among Crows”) with an unsentimental candor that feels necessary and sustaining. Some of the most unforgettable new poems engage aging as a queer migrant man, from the vertiginous “Unfathered” (which feels like it could be the start of a memoir) to “Boxes of Ashes,” which explores death and return to the homeland as a queer person of Indigenous ancestry.
To the North / Al norte. By León Salvatierra. Translated by Javier O. Huerta. University of Nevada Press.
This bilingual edition of the contemporary California-based Nicaraguan poet Salvatierra features translations by Mexican American poet and frequent collaborator Javier O. Huerta that sing like poems in their own right and capture the muscular thrum, coiled social voice, and deceptively plain-spoken playful self-figurations of poems like “LEÓN SALVATIERRA NACIÓ EL DÍA QUE MATARON A SOMOZA” (“LEÓN SALVATIERRA WAS BORN THE DAY THEY KILLED SOMOZA”) and the parodic pledge of allegiance “The Swearing of the Immigrant.” Francisco Aragón’s short yet helpful introduction glosses everything from Al norte’s original publication in Nicaragua to the musicality of Huerta’s translation. Lingering with me are these lines from the concluding “Exit NY”: “En esta ciudad donde todos somos libres / se me ha dado el permiso de encerrar mis palabras” (“In this city in which we are all free / I have been granted permission to put away my words”).
Trace. By Brenda Cárdenas. Red Hen Press.
For two decades now, former Milwaukee Poet Laureate Cárdenas has been a leading literary voice for Latina poets in the Midwest. Her latest book claims an expanded and expansive field of writers and artists (including Lucille Clifton, Ana Mendieta, Cecilia Vicuña, and Remedios Varo), in poems that go beyond the ekphrastic into the kinetic, the performative, the liminal space of dream and desire. Lines I can’t get out of my head: “What can we do with this gathering of ghosts / but welcome them home.”
vanishing point. By Kimberly Reyes. Omnidawn Publishing.
Spanning New York, Puerto Rico, Ireland, and beyond, Black Nuyorican poet Reyes brings together census records, FBI sketches, and QR codes to the author’s poetry films into a meditation on the limits of visibility. Don’t miss the concluding “Legend,” a beautiful concrete poem that both embodies and subverts what we might call (with Rachel Price) “the concrete Atlantic” and helps us imagine (with Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez) a decolonizing diaspora poetics at the embodied limits of the page. A poem that I hope makes it into many an anthology is “Upon the realization that I don’t have a natural habitat,” with its moving opening lines (“I worry mi gente will never see me if I don’t speak Spanish but why / demonize dad”), its use of Irish Gaelic to complicate questions of indigeneity, and its strategic use of a lighter font to score complex racialized and nonequivalent language histories.
Where My Umbilical is Buried. By Amanda Galvan Huynh. Sundress Publications.
This debut collection brings to my mind a poetic history of Chicana and Tejana embodied geographies, with its riffs on La Llorona and Gloria Anzaldúa, yet it also surprises with its silences and counter-writing, as in “Notes on Absence,” a floating galaxy of (no longer) footnoted personal and community histories. Plus, I can’t forget a title like “When My Little Sister Mistakes Selena for Selena Gomez” or an ending like “because don’t you know / Selena Gomez was named after Selena. America / turned her into something it could hold in its mouth.”
Brother Sleep. By Aldo Amparán. Alice James Books.
The Cut Point. By Rodrigo Toscano. Counterpath Press.
Diaries of a Terrorist. By Christopher Soto. Copper Canyon Press.
The Gospel of Wildflowers and Weeds. By Orlando Ricardo Menes. University of New Mexico Press.
Hey Yo! Yo Soy!: 50 Years of Nuyorican Street Poetry, A Bilingual Edition, Tenth Anniversary Book, Second Edition. By Jesús Papoleto Meléndez. 2Leaf Press.
Mopes: A Book in Three Acts. By Kenneth Reveiz. Fence Books.
Redolent. By Farid Matuk and Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez. Singing Saw Press.
Volcanic Interruptions. By Adela Najarro and Janet Trenchard. Jamii Publishing.
Sor Juana. By Florencia Milito. Gunpowder Press.
Tropical Sacrifice. By Lucas de Lima. Birds, LLC.
What Can I Tell You? Selected Poems. By Roberto Carlos García. Flowersong 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).