La Treintena 2020: 30 Books of Latinx Poetry
This was supposed to be an idyllic spring for Latinx poetry, with several long-awaited books just out or slated for publication. Then Covid-19 happened, and poets and presses are now scrambling to promote their books however they can under challenging circumstances. To conclude National Poetry Month, and in solidarity with my fellow poets, I offer this treintena for the days of cuarentena: my quarantine 30 for this cruelest April 30th. I begin with micro-reviews of 10 titles published or forthcoming this year, and then add a list of 20 that encompasses books published since the fall of last year. One welcome sign is the diversity of styles, themes, locations, and histories embodied by these books (many by first-time or emerging authors); another is the major press coverage a few of these titles have received. While Latinx poetry is thriving, one would not necessarily know it from Latinx Studies scholarship, where poetry remains somewhat marginal, even as it is increasingly resonant in the larger culture and can sustain us in these dark days. So, consider this an invitation to put some rhythm, rhyme, and joyful resistance in your social distance!
-Urayoán Noel
After Rubén. By Francisco Aragón. Red Hen Press. In his strongest book yet, Nicaraguan American poet, translator, and longtime Latinx poetry advocate Aragón traces a personal history that is also a gay, Latino rewriting of Rubén Darío and his hetero-patriarchal legacy. In the key of Jack Spicer’s queer classic After Lorca, this fascinating book reads as a personal diary fueled by experiments in translation, effectively transcreating and reimagining classic Darío poems such as “Lo fatal,” “Los motivos del lobo,” and “A Roosevelt” in lyric noir versions perfectly suited for our age of neoliberal empire. (Memorably, Aragón’s version of the latter poem is directed at George W. Bush.) In conversation with legends of Chicanx and Latinx poetry (Juan Felipe Herrera, Andrés Montoya, Francisco X. Alarcón) but also with modernist masters (Akhmatova, Rilke, Montale, Apollinaire, Cendrars, Antonio Machado, and of course Darío), After Rubén reads like a haunted meditation on the complexity of literary traditions and on the many senses of “after”–inspired by Darío while seeking out a contemporary counter-genealogy in what is lost and what remains. Don’t miss “My Rubén,” the luminous personal essay and archival polemic that closes the book. Sample lines: “to convene / antepasados en el desierto. / To swallow what they teach.” (from “Creed”). For another crucial voice in gay Latino poetry, check out the forthcoming Guillotine, Eduardo C. Corral's long-awaited second book.
Borracho [Very Drunk]. Love Poems and Other Acts of Madness / Poemas de Amor Y Otros Actos de Locura. By Jesús Papoleto Meléndez. 2Leaf Press.
This book collects 50 love poems spanning the author’s fifty-year career. Those familiar with Meléndez’s work will recognize his eccentric, syncopated vernacular (which defies conventional translation) but may be surprised by the vulnerability of pieces like the moving “Poem for My Father.” Those new to the poet might want to start with the essential Hey Yo! Yo Soy! 40 Years of Nuyorican Street Poetry (2013), also published by 2Leaf. Still, this is a welcome look at another side of one of the founding figures of Nuyorican poetry. (For another new book from a foundational Nuyorican poet, check out José Angel Figueroa’s Heartbeats, Rhythms, and Fire.)figures of Nuyorican poetry.
The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext. Edited by Felica Rose Chavez, José Olivarez, and Willie Perdomo. Haymarket Books.
This fourth volume of Chicago publisher Haymarket’s influential BreakBeat series focuses on Latinx poets. There are important canonical poets included here (Lorna Dee Cervantes, Virgil Suárez, Nancy Mercado, Naomi Ayala, and others), but as the playful “LatiNext” subtitle indicates, this anthology makes room for an exciting younger generation of poets (including several published for the first time), many with an urban, vernacular sensibility. While honoring people-centered, socially engaged Black and Brown poetic traditions, the anthology contains uncontainable multitudes (ode, villanelle, manifesto, performance text). Cleverly, the book eschews conventional anthological structures (e.g. alphabetic, chronological, geographic), and instead uses the names of Mexican lotería cards for section headings. As if commenting on the power of poetry in our necro-political moment, the editors open with a section called “La Muerte” but close with “La Sirena,” summoning the otherworldly power of song. Kudos to the editors for including underrepresented voices, from Afro-Dominican poets to non-binary ones, in this fresh take on the evolving poetics of both hip-hop and Latinidad. (Note: I am included in this anthology.)
Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien. By Alan Pelaez Lopez. The Operating System.
Best known for their viral 2018 essay “The X in Latinx is a Wound, Not a Trend,” the Oaxaca-raised, Oakland-based Pelaez Lopez here develops a brilliantly sui generis poetics of (formerly undocu-)queer, Afro-indigenous liberation. This first book is driven by a radical collage aesthetic that makes room for repurposed border photographs, defaced passport applications, haunting performance documentation, handwritten/concrete/erasure poetry, screenshots of chats and Google searches, and striking meme poems that recall those on their influential @migrantscribble Instagram page. And yet there are gorgeous quieter moments too: “i want the world to love us and hold us.” This is one of the debuts of the year.
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry By John Murillo. Four Way Books.
This Afro-Chicano poet’s long-awaited follow-up to his celebrated first book Up Jump the Boogie (2010) is an unforgettable read. In searing lyrics, many of whose titles self-reflexively play on literary terminology, Murillo envisions a fugitive soundtrack for these dark times, spanning many histories and many diasporas. Beginning with a variation on Elizabeth Bishop, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry unfolds into a lyric assemblage of Black sonic insurrection within a radically expanded field of U.S. poetry (Eric Dolphy, Marvin Gaye, Gil Scott-Heron, the Notorious B.I.G., etc.). Sample line: “When am I the gunrunner? When am I the wind”? (from “On Lyric Narrative”)
Repetition Nineteen. By Mónica de la Torre. Nightboat Books.
The work of this New York-based poet, translator, and editor from Mexico City has long bridged innovative literary and artistic communities. Repetition Nineteen is a manifesto on poetry and/as experimental translation. De la Torre’s process poetics is so seamless that a “translation key” explaining various compositional procedures (including the repeated use of GoogleTranslate) reads very much as an extension of the poems surrounding it, all one processual ecology of poetry and/as translation (and/as tricked-out tractatus). With a dizzying and delightful array of prompts, procedures, and provocations, this book is an invitation to “use familiarity as camouflage.” Sample title: “Llamaradas Are Blow Jobs.”
For another recent book of experimental Latinx poetry as challenging as it is rewarding, check out In Range by Rodrigo Toscano.
A Sinking Ship Is Still a Ship. By Ariel Francisco. Burrow Press.
I had the pleasure of blurbing this new book by Francisco, a Bronx-born, Miami-raised poet of Dominican and Guatemalan descent. A Sinking Ship Is Still a Ship captures the dystopian beauty and weirdness of Florida (and especially of a Miami that is sinking into the ocean) with equal parts lyric pathos and irrepressible wit. Not unlike its titular ship, this book teeters and flows, somewhere between irony and elegy (“Florida of all places, this great / rotting flower”), at times veering toward a subtle yet distinctly Caribbean surrealism (“how / little of the ocean I can hold in / my own body before it darkens”).
that’s what you get. By Sheila Maldonado. Brooklyn Arts Press.
This forthcoming second book by Brooklyn-born Honduran-American poet Maldonado continues and expands upon the darkly funny meditations on urban life, pop culture, and diasporic belonging that made her debut one-bedroom solo (2011) so memorable. Incorporating everything from a birth certificate erasure to photos of city life with hilarious yet unsettling haiku-like captions, Maldonado is still one of the coolest poets around–too cool for the Central American New York School of Poets, if there were such a thing. At the same time, Maldonado here reveals a renewed lyric force and urgency, with heartbreaking poems about the gentrification of her Coney Island neighborhood and the pain of the return to Honduras. As with other Central American-American poetry books, this one has a lot to say (in and beyond its uneasy punchlines) about the dangers of a Latinidad that is too often aligned with whiteness, citizenship, and privileged mobility. With that’s what you get and the forthcoming publication of Roy G. Guzmán’s debut Catrachos, this is a welcome (and long-overdue) time for Honduran-American poets to shine.
Sample lines: “I used to wonder what it would be like to work in Honduras. / Now I know it is hot and draining instead of cold and draining like New York.” (from “First Day Ever in Teguz, Capital of the Homeland (March, 23, 2012)”)
Título / Title. By Legna Rodríguez Iglesias. Translated by Katherine M. Hedeen. Kenning Editions.
Now Miami-based, the always inventive and often irreverent Rodríguez Iglesias is one of the most celebrated Cuban poets of the post-millennium generation (the so-called Generación Cero). By turns outspoken, funny, dark, and strange, the highly associative poems in this forthcoming book bristle with a queer energy, and they gleefully desacralize both Cuba and the U.S., with playful or sarcastic takes on everything from the Castro family to an H&M store in Miami Beach. On the surface, Rodríguez Iglesias’s writing is defiantly anti-poetic (right down to the generic title), yet Hedeen’s translations carefully convey the nested quality of the Spanish originals: love poems and/as political satire (or is it the other way around?).
Year of the Dog. By Deborah Paredez. BOA Editions.
Those who know Paredez from her groundbreaking Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (2009) may not know that she is also a gifted poet. Well now you know, because this book is a revelation. Like Selenidad, Year of the Dog is a lyrical yet rigorous reflection on memory and embodiment from a Tejana perspective; it weaves together different strands (the Vietnam War, the author’s father, the story of Hecuba, the traps of the archive) while foreclosing a facile resolution. In conversation with innovative African American theory and poetics, Year of the Dog imagines its own radical tradition, incorporating and repurposing handwriting, photos, and other intimate documents alongside poems that double as process notes and counter-archival records. Redeploying traditional poetic forms with elegance and fearlessness within a collage aesthetic, Year of the Dog is a stunning performance, and was recently shouted out by the New York Times. Don’t miss the short but brilliant concrete poem that closes the book, where a gendered poetics of handiwork is both recovered and subverted.
Further reading
The Accidental. By Gina Franco. University of Arkansas Press.
Advantages of Being Evergreen. By Oliver Baez Bendorf. Cleveland State University Poetry Center.
Body of Render. By Felicia Zamora. Red Hen Press.
Borderland Apocrypha. By Anthony Cody. Omnidawn.
Catrachos. By Roy G. Guzmán. Graywolf Press.
Coatlicue Girl. By Gris Muñoz. FlowerSong Books.
Codex of Love: Bendita ternura. By Liliana Valenzuela. Translated by Angela McEwan. FlowerSong Books.
Corta la piel: It Pierces the Skin. By Xánath Caraza. Translated by Sandra Kingery. FlowerSong Books.
Despojo. By Tatiana Figueroa Ramírez. FlowerSong Books.
An Empty Pot’s Darkness. By José Angel Araguz. Airlie Press.
Guidebooks for the Dead. By Cynthia Cruz. Four Way Books.
An Incomplete List of Names. By Michael Torres. Beacon Press.
Inland Empire. By Leah Huizar. Noemi Press.
Meditación Fronteriza. By Norma Elia Cantú. University of Arizona Press.
Mowing Leaves of Grass. By Matt Sedillo. FlowerSong Books.
Raft of Flame. By Desirée Alvarez. Omnidawn.
Tertulia. By Vincent Toro. Penguin Books.
Thresholes. By Lara Mimosa Montes. Coffee House Press.
Thrown in the Throat. By Benjamin Garcia. Milkweed Editions.
Turn Around, BRXGHT XYXS. By Rosebud Ben-Oni. Get Fresh Books.
If you want to check out additional titles by Latinx poets beyond conventional books of poetry, consider Ariana Brown’s chapbook Sana Sana (Game Over Books), Joey de Jesus’s intermedia book art project HOAX (The Operating System), Marcelo Hernández Castillo’s memoir Children of the Land (Harper), and Elizabeth Acevedo’s novel-in-verse Clap When You Land (Quill Tree Books).
Urayoán Noel is an associate professor of English and Spanish and Portuguese at NYU and serves on the Latinx Project Faculty Board.