Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition: Toward a 21st Century Poetics

Citation preview

Page ix →

Acknowledgments “Latino Poetry: Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition” is a lecture delivered at the Library of Congress on April 10, 2014, on the occasion of National Poetry Month, sponsored by Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. With thanks to Francisco AragГіn. “Alurista: Toward a Chicano Poetics” includes the preface written for Alurista’s volume of poetry, which I also edited, Xicano Duende: A Select Anthology (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2011). With thanks to Gary Keller. A compressed version of “The Double Doors into J. Michael Martinez’s Heredities” appears in Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing, edited by Carmen GimГ©nez Smith and John ChГЎvez (Denver: Counterpath Press, 2014). “The Blatino Poetics of Aracelis Girmay” is a lecture delivered at the Vermont College of Fine Arts on December 31, 2014. “Publishers on a Mission: Three Excellent Debut Poets, ” “Powerful Debuts by Three African-American Poets,” “Midcareer: Three Poets and Their Four Books,” and “Juan Felipe Herrera’s Global Voice and Vision” appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books as commissioned reviews published on May 13, 2013, January 18, 2014, July 21, 2015, and September 23, 2015, respectively. With thanks to Tom Lutz. The reviews of Iliana Rocha’s Karankawa and Shane McCrae’s The Animal Too Big to Kill appeared in The Rumpus, published on October 21, 2015, and January 13, 2016, respectively. With thanks to Brian Spears. The reviews in the “Twelve Essential Latino Poetry Books” section were part of my column with the El Paso Times of Texas, which ran from 2002 to 2012. With thanks to the now-retired features editor RamГіn RenterГ-a. “The Activist Role of the Writer” is adapted from a keynote address delivered at the University of California–Davis on May 15, 2014, on the occasion of the 2014 Page x →Conference TransAmericas, sponsored by the UC Davis Queer, Feminist and Transgender Studies Research Cluster. An excerpt was reprinted in The Rumpus as part of a roundtable forum titled “Fate of the Writer: Shuttling between Solitude and Engagement.” With thanks to David Biespiel. “The Writer’s Journey: A Motivation” is a commencement speech delivered at Pine Manor College on July 19, 2014, on the occasion of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program summer graduation. With thanks to Meg Kearney. “Poetry Brings out the Mexican in Me” appears in Others Will Enter the Gates: Immigrant Poets on Poetry, Influences, and Writing in America, edited by Abayomi Animashaun (Hudson, NY: Black Lawrence Press, 2015). The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement Speech was delivered on April 23, 2015, on the occasion of the 2015 Publishing Triangle Awards. The opening section of “Erotic Light, Amor Oscuro: On the Queer Poetics of Francisco X. AlarcГіn and His Muse, Federico GarcГ-a Lorca” was published as a tribute to AlarcГіn with NBC-Latino online on January 17, 2016; the remaining essay was delivered as a lecture at the X Congreso Internacional Sobre Literatura Chicana y Estudios Latinos in Madrid, Spain, on May 30, 2016. Thanks again to Francisco AragГіn, AlarcГіn’s translator, for insights on De amor oscuro/Of Dark Love. Many thanks to Ocean Vuong and Rajiv Mohabir for trusting me with their manuscripts. And many thanks to Kazim Ali for being persistent and patient as I gathered the acorns to complete this book.

Page 1 →

Critical Essays I have always contended that the most important work being done today is in the field of ethnic letters. I’d like to add that within that field, the most critical pressure point pulses from the queer body of color—its representation and its cultural production. And this speaks to the necessity of scholarly conversations like the ones I am initiating in these essays, which give context, language, and energy to the study and appreciation of the difficult but beautiful journeys of some of the most exciting writers of today. Note that although I identify as a queer Chicano writer and critic, I am not limiting my focus to works by queer Chicanos. I have purposely reached out to include studies on writings by African American, Asian American, and Native American writers. This is both an act of solidarity and a gesture toward accuracy and honesty since, particularly in the poetry community, these ethnic groups intersect socially and politically. Another important choice I’ve made is in engaging the works of a few veteran writers, like Alurista and Robert Hayden—literary ancestors to many of the younger voices I’m writing about. (I include a longer piece on Juan Felipe Herrera in the “Critical Reviews” section and one on Francisco X. AlarcГіn in the “Critical Grace Notes” section.) As I point out in my Library of Congress lecture, “Latino Poetry: Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition,” it’s important to look back in order to gain perspective about where we are headed next. But my attention is mostly on the younger voices themselves, visions that I believe will amplify the visibility of the communities they belong to. I place my hope on the next generation of writers of color because hope is inextricably bound to our stories, which is why we must continue telling them. Our stories are sometimes sad, sometimes tragic, sometimes painful to listen to, but they are Page 2 →evidence of our fortitude and perseverance. Our writers matter because they tell us that our narratives are important enough to be recorded on paper for posterity. And there is something absolutely marvelous in the knowledge that people like ourselves made the glorious decision to imagine our bodies, our bodies of color, our queer bodies of color, as empowered participants and protagonists—away from the edges of alienation and exile and closer to the truths of our unerasable realities.

Page 3 →

Latino Poetry Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition The recent deaths of some of our legendary Latino citizen-writers gives fresh perspective to the remarks I’m about to make because it reaffirms the need to continue our community’s artistic production and to contribute to the literary legacy of those who, long before many of us even knew how to read, placed expression on the page in order to inspire, motivate, and educate the audience of their time and the audience yet to come. The loss of those writers who precede us underscores the urgency of new responsibilities: we must remember their names and achievements so that we may have a history; we must move forward as mentors and teachers so that we may hold sacred their values; we must weave our struggles with theirs so that we may have a journey with a past, a present, and a future. And let us reflect on our own mortality, that as time passes we are all one step closer to our own demise. Have we done right by the lessons of those who came before? Have we done our part to clear a path for those who come after? This is the light under which I present the following insights about the contemporary period of Latino poetry and its most exceptional voices who will guide us through the shifting demographics of this country’s population, for I am convinced that Latino letters, so often ignored or overlooked by the current literary establishment, will become the most important cultural testaments bearing witness to the era of transition. The work being published today will address the critical questions of tomorrow’s sizable Latino population: Who were we back then? How did we get here? Where do we go next? It’s appropriate at this moment to name one recent loss, a beloved veterano poet and Sacramento’s poet laureate, in Page 4 →whose memory I dedicate this presentation, JosГ© Montoya (1932–2013)—¡PRESENTE! A Korean War veteran and social activist, he believed that the strength of the word could invoke strength in ourselves. He wrote the following: Look upward once more, CompaГ±ero/compaГ±era, And unleash your lethal Fire power! Pierce and shatter That insidious underbelly With truth bursts and dreaming And your devastating Filero-sharp gaze. Bring down The carrion eaters, poet, And brace yourself For the next Assault!

The rally cry in Montoya’s poem, written in 1980, speaks to a political movement that began in the 1960s, when art, theater, and above all, poetry, played an important role in galvanizing the Chicano community through expressions of pride in culture, history, religion, language, and identity. Decades later, he felt those calls to action were still necessary—always the threat of erasure and forgetting, always the climate of fear against a growing ethnic population, which justified discriminatory policies and fueled anti-immigrant, anti-Latino sentiments in the political, social, and educational arenas. In the current year, does this sound eerily familiar? The artistic response of today, in the spirit of protest and resistance, has been organizing and gaining momentum through social media, such as poet Francisco X. AlarcГіn’s Facebook phenomenon Poets Respond to S.B. 1070—the racial-profiling bill passed by the Arizona State Legislature—or writer Tony DГ-az’s Houstonbased Librotraficante, which builds “underground libraries” and smuggles banned books into communities (like the Tucson Unified School District) that are denied the “dangerous” writings by writers of color. In such a besieged atmosphere,Page 5 → it is imperative to have a poet—so says Bertolt Brecht—to sing “about the dark times.” How appropriate that such a poet should hail from the most conflict-ridden state of today’s troubled Southwest. Though Governor Jan Brewer appointed Latino writer Alberto RГ-os as the first poet laureate of Arizona, it’s disappointing that he has publicly proclaimed that he plans to “leave politics out of it.” Fortunately, leaving politics out of it was not native son Eduardo C. Corral’s approach in shaping Slow Lighting, a hugely popular book that has found its audience across an impressive spectrum of readers. Corral takes his cues from a more fitting literary mentor, JosГ© Montoya, and employs code-switching and references familial history, Catholicism, and Mexican popular culture to consider a childhood past on the border, among undocumented border-crossers and day laborers, without sentimentality or mere reportage—two of the trappings in weaker writings that attempt to mine poetry out of personal experience. Corral’s startling use of desert imagery and metaphor, surprising linguistic leaps, and risks in structural configurations add up to one of the most original books of poetry written by a Latino poet who is unafraid to proclaim his ethnicity or his sexuality—he is Chicano, he is gay. Identity, our literary ancestors taught us, is empowerment. But so too is this a work of art that is destined for longevity, the only Latino selection in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. As Corral looks outside of his community for further literary guidance from such luminaries as Robert Hayden, Bei Dao, Donald Justice, and Jean Valentine, he doesn’t resist looking inside for direction also, as evident by the central poem in Slow Lightning, “Variation on a Theme by JosГ© Montoya,” which pays homage to Montoya’s signature piece, “El Louie.” Corral’s elegy to “El Monchie” eventually soars on its own intralingual, intertextual wings since it channels both Montoya’s “El Louie” and Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool”: QuГ© chido his chistes. QuГ© chido his tocayo. QuГ© chido his peso-colored balas. QuГ© chido his mandas. QuГ© Page 6 →chido his snakeskin botas. QuГ© chido his guitarra. QuГ© chido his rolas. QuГ© chido his Chalino t-shirtsВ .В .В . (and so forth) As a book with politicized leanings, Slow Lightning doesn’t shy away from demanding empathy for the

struggles of the undocumented, not when the poet’s consciousness of the disparities of class and immigrant status was shaped among the subjects he writes about. When Corral sings about the dark times—death, violence, and injustice on the U.S.-Mexico border—he does so with the deepest respect for the stories that should be made audible, for the people who should be made visible—not kept out, silenced and unseen, even from the current poet laureate’s poetry outreach in Arizona. For further reading, I’d like to recommend the writings of Javier O. Huerta, who was once undocumented and who has become an important voice for immigration reform. His poetry books, Some Clarifications y Otros Poemas and American Copia: An Immigrant Epic, are inventive interpretations of another kind of transformative transition: from undocumented alien to immigrant citizen to activist. Identity, and specifically the investigation of Chicano/Amerindian ancestry, is the engine that drives this next distinguished work, winner of the Walt Whitman Award and selected, quite appropriately, by its literary forefather, Juan Felipe Herrera. The book is Heredities: Poems, by J. Michael Martinez. Like Herrera, Martinez engages with pre-Columbian mythology and the development of a post-Columbian, Spanish-language, Mexican Catholic nationhood, which continues to inform the tropes, imagery, and vocabulary of Chicano art and culture. Indeed, the collision of the Old World with the New, the Spaniard with the indigenous, the light-skinned with the dark-skinned, has instigated the hierarchies of privilege and class, the notions of entitlement and belonging, the damages of exclusion, disenfranchisement, and oppression that tumble down through the centuries to inhabit the artistic expressions of the present day. On this score, what makes Herrera’s voice so unique is his willingness to use humor and wordplay to unsettle the facile equation of “us vs. them.” He eschews nationalism, Page 7 →self-victimization, and essentialism with a body of work that defies easy categorization, that runs the gamut from populist and accessible to abstract, avant-garde, and experimental. Martinez too refuses to see identity as a tug-of-war between binaries or polar opposites. Instead he takes such inclinations to task by presenting a speaker whose “white” skin calls into question his claim to “brown” pride. Heredities, at once intellectual and passionate about the question of bloodlines, goes straight to the bone—literally—with such stunning poems as “Articulations of Quetzalcoatl’s Spine” and “The Sternum of Our Lady of Guadalupe” (anatomic illustrations included), which showcase an inventive critique of authenticity, evidence, and belief. The fluidity of proof and imagination, of story and documentation, form the overarching concept of Heredities, which in many ways is also a book-length love poem to a series of unexpected objects of affection, among them epistles, nomenclature, etymology, and even rhetoric: I wintered there from noun to verb beneath your maiden name. I said, The Southern Hemisphere is the clean bruise of the hours. I said, Open the closure. You said, Break the window, let the wind cool the subjunctive: we will merge in the solstice of the noun. Corral’s tender gaze on the working-class male body and the homoeroticism of the Sonora landscape, Martinez’s androgynous courtship and slow undressing of semantics and logic, denote a sensibility that turns away from a hetero-normative masculine tone and voice that have dominated Latino poetry for decades. A difficult truth: most of the Latino poetry books published yesterday and today were written by men. Poets like Corral and Martinez spearhead a shift away from the homophobic and sexist sentiments that continue to afflict our Latino communities. Thankfully, other notable male voices, regardless of their sexuality, are also unpacking masculinity and presenting more complex views of male identity. A few texts worth mentioning: Chicano poet Tim Z. HernГЎndez’s Skin Tax, Puerto Rican poet Kevin A. GonzГЎlez’s Cultural Studies, Cuban American poet Richard Blanco’s Looking for the Gulf Motel, and Chicano poet Joseph Page 8 →Delgado’s Ditch Water. But to illustrate this point more clearly, I’d like to introduce a poet whose book was published more recently. And mark my words, it will have the staying power of Slow Lightning and Heredities precisely because it offers an insider’s perspective into a hard-won journey toward self-realization. In David Tomas Martinez’s Hustle, the reader meets a Latino youth in distress, reaching out to gangs, drugs, military enlistment, and finally poetry as a potential life preserver. Those versed in Chicano letters will recall the

work of the late, celebrated “Chicanindio” poet and human rights activist raГєlrsalinas (1934–2008), a venerated performer and mentor from Texas, who spent the latter years of his life nurturing a writing community at La Resistencia Bookstore in Austin. Like Montoya, Salinas was a firm believer in poetry as an agent of healing and change. His advocacy for indigenous peoples and his outreach at juvenile detention centers made him a hero to a number of marginalized groups. Here is an example of an errant youth who eventually found his way, to the benefit of many. As a young man in his midtwenties Salinas was imprisoned for eleven years, indicted for his involvement with drugs. From that incarceration was born the will to liberate the spirit and the mind—a rebirth that informed his most well-known poem, “Un Trip through the Mind Jail,” which he wrote while in prison. After his release, he lived a rich and cultured life as an ardent activist. David Tomas Martinez’s journey is just beginning, but it’s an auspicious start. Hustle echoes Salinas: as the speaker travels back through his life story, so too a burgeoning awareness of his place among his family and community, of the follies and privileges of his gender, and of his potential to transcend the limitations imposed upon him by the lack of opportunity but also by the shortcomings in his own disposition. This multidimensionality of character depicts masculinity with honesty and dignity. It admits to error in judgment and attempts to grow from that knowledge. The following is from the poem “The Mechanics of Men,” in which the speaker reveals a pattern of alcohol dependency that runs through the generations of his family. The excerpt references a previous episode in which the speaker’s lack of mechanical prowess nearly caused a fatal accident at the shipyardPage 9 → when he was in the navy. The “us” refers to the speaker and his father: Neither of us is the most mechanical of men, yet we still pride ourselves on how we fashion our tools. I wake up shivering and crying in an empty bed, the afternoon light entering and leaving an empty bottle of wine near an emptier glass—or roll over and try, and fail, to remember a woman’s name, which never really gets old, just uncouth to say so, and feel fixed. To feel fixed is to feel a mechanical spirit, to feel love, or at least to play at paste for an evening, to make believe she will never leave me, as life almost did when I cut the green hose, and was lonely and shaking that day on the deck of the destroyer, looking into the green water, and wondered what would be written on my tomb: “Killed by oxygen was this unmechanical man.” If he’s “unmechanical,” he is indeed flesh and blood. The admission of vulnerability in this poem and others in this collection shatters assumptions about Latino males and machismo. It’s a refreshing stance, particularly because the burden of questioning and challenging gender privilege has been placed mostly on feminist writings—and there are more important avenues of examination that Latina poets are undertaking, other than giving the male psyche additional attention. And before I turn to those avenues I’d like to offer a prediction: that as our society continues to change, indeed transitions, only those male writers who exercise openeyed reflection and open-minded inquiry will remain relevant. Those who cling to the outdated and narrow sexual politics of the not-so-distant past will be preserved as relics, reminders of less-enlightened times.

Page 10 →Since I’ve highlighted three male poets, I’d now like to balance the equation by highlighting the three female poets I consider to be writing the most interesting work today. Like Corral and the two Martinezes, these next three poets also have published books within the last three years. Carmen GimГ©nez Smith has released four poetry collections to date. She published her first in 2009—that’s how productive she has been. In this rather speedy trajectory, she has established herself as an exquisite practitioner of the compressed line loaded with energy and critique. Indeed, the myths, fairy tales, and cultural fables that she deconstructs and reconfigures in her two recent collections, Goodbye, Flicker and Milk & Filth, rejuvenate the feminist lens with a biting wit that is current and topical. Milk & Filth, in particular, will surprise readers with its provocative double-edged strategy: not only does she call into question the male-authored narratives with female protagonists, she also asks that women examine closely the reimagined female protagonists: Is that truly how women see themselves? The inhabitants of the “Gender Fables” section in Milk & Filth reminds me of the “Quarteto Mexicano” section in Pat Mora’s Agua Santa/Holy Water. Subtitled “Talk Show Interviews with Coatlicue the Aztec Goddess, Malinche the Maligned, the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Llorona: The Wailer,” the imagined airtime allotted to the iconic foursome is a humorous and thought-provoking reconsideration of the dark goddesses—Mexican figures who have been imprisoned inside feminine identities that have come to symbolize (respectively) destruction, betrayal, saintliness, and errant motherhood. Mora empowers these archetypes by rescuing them from their misogynist representations. Each woman has her own voice and an opportunity to speak—not to defend herself or elicit sympathy from the studio audience but to respond to the one-sided story told about her. That is, to transform the monologue into a dialogue. GimГ©nez Smith expands the reach and purpose of her “Gender Fables” and invites Shakespeare’s Juliet, Nabokov’s Lolita, and other fictions of male fantasy to the stage since everything, including revision, is a postmodern performance. Therein the intriguing complexity of GimГ©nez Smith’s sometimes tongue-incheek commentary of femininity and even feminism, as illustratedPage 11 → in the poem “When God Was a Woman.” I will highlight three of the stanzas and explicate the movements within: When God was a woman, empire was meh. When God was a woman, we built Schools of Listening and every week we sat quietly until we could hear each other’s thoughts. The opening stanza ribs the reactionary politics of both feminists and antifeminists by presenting a portrait of a matriarchal culture that very quickly slips into a hyperbolic vision of peace and civility. And a few stanzas later, it’s clear the female deity can’t escape the socially constructed gender stereotypes: She played harmless pranks because she liked keeping things light. She made it rain on our collective good hair days.

When she met someone who seemed fun and a little mysterious she invited him into heaven, Yet the closing stanza completely subverts whatever sentiment has guided the reading of the poem thus far: then she made her daughter blind for a week, which in retrospect was kind of mean, but her daughter made the best of it. That propensity to be defiant or rebellious, indeed to misbehave, adds a dimensionality to this female deity that is either a positive attribute or a negative one, depending on where one stands in the political aisle. But the triumphant one in the poem, it turns out, is not the higher power but the subordinate daughter, who is capable of surviving the whims of her mother/God.Page 12 → The daughter doesn’t need to assume a position of authority to have agency or live a soloist narrative; indeed, she exists, even thrives on her own life force. She is, GimГ©nez Smith would argue, a third-wave feminist. Third-wave feminism, which questions not only male-constructed paradigms but also the ideologies of secondwave (mostly white, middle-class) feminism, encourages women of color to seek direction and definition in the more complex spaces of their own experiences, where gender, sexuality, race, class, and ethnicity intersect. The women of color movement in Latina letters has a lengthy history and plays an influential role in expanding the consciousness of feminism—two texts come to mind: Gloria AnzaldГєa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by AnzaldГєa and CherrГ-e Moraga. These essays helped contextualize the writings of a burgeoning group of distinguished Latina writers, including the poetry of Sandra Cisneros, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Sandra MarГ-a Estevez, Demetria MartГ-nez, and Alicia Gaspar de Alba. Their works locate femininity and womanhood in spaces that had been long perceived as marginal or of little value, such as in working-class barrios, immigrant households, lesbian relationships, childlessness, and the aging body. They also situate the woman of color in roles she has not been expected to inhabit: as a member of the academic or artistic professions, as a traveler or tourist, or as an independent spirit. A worthy successor in that impressive lineage of female poets is Laurie Ann Guerrero. Guerrero’s debut collection, A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, takes incredible risks in subject matter. The book is populated by women who made headlines for murdering their children, by mothers who understand (even as they cringe) the impulse of wanting to be free of the imprisoning kitchens, of the maternal obligation. Like Mora with “Quarteto Mexicano,” Guerrero reaches back to La Malinche, who sacrificed her children instead of allowing her love bond to be used as a tool of persuasion or coercion against her. In A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, a nine-poem sequence allows La Malinche to chime in from time to time, a disquieting presence and raw connecting tissue that looms over the stories of all the other women, reminding Page 13 →them of a birthright that’s threatening to men, in particular, but also to whiteness in general—the power to create and to destroy. By inhabiting the honest space of ambivalence and asserting thought independent of religious and social pressures, Guerrero steers the conversation away from right and wrong, shadow and light, and other binaries that have been used to control the behavior and perception of women of color. Suddenly those unsettling narratives become allegories and parables that speak to larger societal conversations like reproductive rights and political action. Take, for example, the poem “Stray Cat,” which, in the context of what I just stated, does not need further analysis:

She was fat. Round as the moon, just as gray. She didn’t have time for hiding, for safety, for hissing away onlookers. Her legs jerked and out rolled the little slick and wormy bundles. Two. She circled them, inspected the mousy ears, licked the furless pink skin. They made no noise. Their tiny hearts rippled, though softly. She ate one. Then, she ate the other. The final voice I’d like to discuss belongs to Cynthia Cruz. Of German and Mexican ancestry, Cruz has published two volumes of poetry, Ruin and The Glimmering Room, that read like a one-two punch to the gut. She’s relentless in her depiction of youth who become so disconnected from their families they exchange whatever ethnic or cultural identities they were born into for lives as outsiders—drug addicts, runaways, prostitutes. This rejection of home and even society comes from suffering childhood traumas, such as incest, and the realization that safety and protection are falsehoods, love and affection, artifice. It’s a bleak and perhaps apocalyptic vision of contemporary society, but these are broken times, with politicians, religious figures, and world leaders who remind us of those parents and guardians who betray our trust. This is not a strenuous associative leap in Cruz’s work, since, in The Glimmering Room in particular, the dictions of warfare, capital, and religion are used to articulate the violence against the child and the child’s reach for familiar Page 14 →imagery and narratives that give shape to the harm endured. As an example, the poem “Self-Portrait”: I did not want my body Spackled in the world’s Black beads and broke Diamonds. What the world Wanted. I did not. Of the things It wanted. The body of Sunday Morning, the warm wine and The blood. The dripping fox Furs dragged through the black New York snow—the parked car, the pearls, To the first pew—the funders, The trustees, the bloat, the red weight of

The world. Their faces. I wanted not That. I wanted Saint Frances, the love of His animals. The wolf, the broken and bleeding— That was me. To reach for the feral for both identification and identity speaks to the feelings of alienation and isolation from the “civilized” world that values materialism, privilege, and wealth. Stripped of its clothes and costumes, the body gets in touch with its vulnerability, perhaps even its purity, in which communication is not verbal but instinctual, in which exchanges do not indulge or produce excess but are reduced to the primal need—nourishment, both physical and spiritual. Connecting to the animal-self or even shape-shifting into an animal has its roots in Mesoamerican folk religion. Latina poets such as Alma Luz Villanueva have imagined nahualismo in their writings as a method of attaining freedom and enlightenment: to inhabit the kindred animal spirit is to vacate the human body and its inextricable ties to the manufactured and superficial world. Cruz’s speakers need to step out of the rubble in order to make sense of it, which can be a kind of healing, but the primary purpose of looking back is to understand how to move forward. Page 15 →Through the six contemporary poets I have singled out, we have been reminded of the rich foundation of thought and creativity that trail-blazed the platform on which these six poets now stand. I’m reminded of the following analogy the poet Gary Soto made about paying attention fully to a poem when reading it: “A poem is worth quartering like an apple.В .В .В . What the heck is inside? Seeds from other poems.” Though Soto is addressing the notion of influence and literary lineage at large, I believe it’s worth noting that he’s also speaking to the way we can situate a poem (and a poet) within a cultural, social, and political context. Through the poems of the current generation, the poems of previous generations will be recollected and reread. Through the poems of the current generation, the poems of the next generation will be read and understood. That is why it’s up to the younger writers to add something more to what has already been built; otherwise the landscape becomes stagnant. What these six young poets are shaping is a cohort of learned artists who are unafraid to challenge their ancestry’s weaknesses and to recognize their ancestry’s strengths: improve on the former, build on the latter. The end result is a complex view of politics and history, a dynamic approach to art. If I have sharpened my focus primarily on Chicano poets, it is simply because of our sizable numbers: Chicanos and people of Mexican descent make up two-thirds of the Latino population in the United States. I am not proclaiming the Chicano voice as the most important or even the most audible, but rather, the most frequently heard by those who are listening to the varied tenors and tones of Latino poetry. And it becomes particularly pressing today, when the pitch of the debates over immigration reform and the need for Mexican American Studies has reached such intensity that the Chicano voice—that Chicano voices—must continue to speak in order assert the Chicano community’s relevance to American society and culture. Poetry today, as in the past, will write the way. Page 16 → Works Cited AnzaldГєa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. AnzaldГєa, Gloria, and CherrГ-e Moraga.This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Latham, NY: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1981. Blanco, Richard. Looking for the Gulf Motel. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. Corral, Eduardo. Slow Lightning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

Cruz, Cynthia. The Glimmering Room. New York: Four Way Books, 2013. Cruz, Cynthia. Ruin. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2006. Delgado, Joseph. Ditch Water. San Francisco: KГіrima Press, 2013. GimГ©nez Smith, Carmen. Goodbye, Flicker. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. GimГ©nez Smith, Carmen. Milk & Filth. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. GonzГЎlez, Kevin A. Cultural Studies. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009. Guerrero, Laurie Ann. A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. HernГЎndez, Tim Z. Skin Tax. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2005. Huerta, Javier O. American Copia: An Immigrant Epic. Houston: Arte PГєblico Press, 2012. Huerta, Javier O. Some Clarifications y Otros Poemas. Houston: Arte PГєblico Press, 2007. Lengel, Kerry. “Interview with Alberto RГ-os.”Arizona Republic (online), August 22, 2013. Martinez, David Tomas. Hustle. Louisville, KY: Saraband Books, 2014. Martinez, J. Michael. Heredities: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. Montoya, JosГ©. “The Carrion Eaters.” Information: 20 Years of Joda. San Jose, CA: Chusma House, 1992. 172. Mora, Pat. Agua Santa/Holy Water. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. Soto, Gary. What Poets Are Like. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2013. Villanueva, Alma Luz. Vida. San Antonio: Wings Press, 2003.

Page 17 →

Alurista Toward a Chicano Poetics How I dislike that word Latino. And yet I seem to be on a one-man campaign to abolish it. It’s a failed enterprise because I too have to use it as a collective, all-encompassing, all-inclusive noun. It’s a term of convenience, and there is no better word to use (at the moment) when I’m referring to a community whose ancestors have roots in one of the many colonized countries in Latin America. If your people come from the Dominican Republic, you’re Latino. Mexico? Latino. Brazil? Latino. And so forth. It’s a term gathering peoples through geography, not class or race or alien status. And where are we gathered? In the United States. We are U.S. Latinos, as if there is such a thing as a non-U.S. Latino. There isn’t. Latino (despite its etymological connection to the term Latin or Latin America) is an American term, as presumptuously appropriated as the term America. See? How more American can Latinos prove themselves to be? We even imitate the imperial behaviors of our new homeland. But now that we are all stewing in the proverbial melting pot, we begin to take notice of our differences, which complicates this idea of Latinos as a unified front. Yes, there are some dominant characteristics in all our identities: if there’s a language besides English it’s most likely Spanish; if there’s a religion it’s most likely Catholic; if there’s a political affiliation it’s most likely liberal. But even those come with varying degrees of difference in colloquialisms and vocabularies, in beliefs and mythologies, in ceremonial and voting practices. Still, for the most part we are all Latino, though some prefer other labels: Hispanic, Mexican American, Chicano, Nuyorican, Tejano, Boricua, Tico, and so on. The differences are not enough to make enemies of Page 18 →each other, though turf wars do exist (between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, between Mexicans and Central Americans, for example) in certain urban spaces. But if anything, Latino helps all of us understand that, in general, we are the brown people, neither white nor black nor Asian. Of course, there is plenty of overlap: white Cubans and Euro-Argentinians, Afro-Dominicans and Afro-Columbians, Filipinos. But those are exceptions. For the most part, Latino, that group that will outnumber even white Americans by 2050, is the unstoppable brown tsunami. I have to chuckle a bit when I hear this expressed more as an anxiety than as a fact. Because the fact is that Latino is not a monolithic designation—it’s simply spoken of that way for the sake of summation and quick categorization—good old American efficiency. Will Spanish ever replace English? I doubt it. Most Latinos may speak it, but most don’t write it. And one generation later, most immigrant families let go of it. Will Catholicism dominate over all other faiths? Nope. We Catholics have such a reputation for converting—bornagain Christianity, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witness—anything’s more fun than being a Catholic. Remember, we come from countries where Catholicism was not a choice. And what a great thing is religious freedom in America. And in terms of our political loyalties, we tend to be flexible. We did help reelect George W. Bush to a second term in 2004, but so too did we help elect Barack Obama in 2008. But the term Latino doesn’t explain these complexities, it contains and restrains them. And that’s why I dislike the word. It reveals no specific country, nation, or place on a map, it illustrates no specific cultural identity or lifestyle, it points toward no exact history of migration or imagination, and therefore it’s a politically diffused word—national but not international or nationalistic. It’s a safe word, a word of politeness, and who wants to read safe, polite poetry? Ah, and you thought we were never going to get to the poetry? But before that, a little more ranting: all of these objections aside, the primary reason I dislike the word Latino is that it practices a damaging act of erasure against one group specifically—the Chicanos. Chicanos, for the uninitiated, are the second-, third-, or fourth-generation Americans of Mexican descent who are political agents for the expression of cultural and ethnic Page 19 →pride. We reject the word Hispanic, we reject the hyphenated word Mexican-American, and we dislike the word Latino. We are Chicanos, and we belong to the group that composes two-thirds of this greater population called Latino. Indeed, we are the majority, but that majority status is not reflected in the term Latino or anything that’s linked to that word: Latino culture, Latino arts, Latino

music, and so on. Who benefits from the monolithic collective term? All of the other communities, of course, those with representation in this country, but not the high populations. But because one of the main tenets of the Chicano is solidarity with all oppressed groups, we will never reject or exclude, except when we’re Chicano, which is an exclusive term. Not anyone can be a Chicano. But anyone can be a Chicano ally. However, know that if you join us, we are also the most radical group, antiassimilationist and antiestablishment; we rose as a selfidentified community on protests and hunger strikes, sit-ins and boycotts. We are troublemakers and, in the post-9 /11 era, we are constantly accused of being anti-American. See how easy it is to hide the problem children (or oneself) in the group picture called Latino? One important component of Chicano culture has been the arts—and poetry especially. Language, we have always known, is a weapon, and how we wield it through our chants, songs, theater, storytelling, and poems. They began as populist forums, embedded with political statements and rally cries during the late 1960s and to this day, though they have also been usurped into the academic worlds since that same Chicano Movement also ushered in an entire area of academic study: Chicano Studies. This is one advantage Chicanos have over every other Latin group: Chicano history, Chicano literature, Chicano arts have all become legitimate fields of academic concentration. It is no accident, then, that in the last few years they have also been the most threatened areas of study because, according to the haters, the separatist rhetoric and anti-American sentiment (which Chicanos call pride and critique) have no place in institutions of higher learning. There is less protest against Boricua or Afro-Latino/Caribbean Studies or even Central American or South American Studies because these fields are not as widespread or institutionalized as Page 20 →Chicano Studies. Mexicans and Chicanos have always been the most threatening Latino presence—because of our homeland’s proximity to Mexico, because of the high number of undocumented migration, because of the speed with which Mexicans leap from working class to middle class—just one generation, just one college degree is all it takes. And, yes, you’ve heard the figures of Chicanos and the soaring rates of teenage pregnancies and the high school dropout rate, but when you have such numbers, there are also as many success stories. Those, unfortunately, are not highlighted by the media. This class of educated Chicanos has also produced a number of writers, more than any other Latino group in this country, but it’s hard to tell because this group in unevenly represented on the bookshelves. Perhaps because the publishing center of the United States, New York City, is as far away as you can get from the heart of AztlГЎn—the Southwest, the Chicano heartland—the word Chicano is rarely uttered or even understood. Poetry, however, is dominated by Chicanos, even if you’ve only been exposed to non-Chicano/other Latino poets. So, in an effort to illustrate Chicano poetics—the most influential Latino poetics in this country—I’d like to go back to the source, our earliest activist and wordsmith, Alurista. The following is an essay, part homage, part explication, of who he is, why he’s important, why you should read him as an introductory lesson in Chicano /Latino poetry, and why he has become essential once again in the age of erasure. Alurista writes from a Chicano center, not a margin. His most frequently used word is raza, his mother tongue is Spanish, and his muses are complex: the activist furor of the sixties and seventies, the Reagan era of the eighties, the “Bushit” of the nineties, and into the new millennium, the Chicano footfall and the Amerindian footprint. The skies of his poetics invoke the pre-Columbian deities and mythologies, the ground is staunchly twentieth century, and the air is never silent—one can always hear the outrage, the protest, the call to action, the rally cry, and that most exercised of freedoms of expression, the criticism bordering on scorn. Indeed, this last element is perhaps the only border in Alurista’s work. Although he was educated mostly in Page 21 →San Diego, a border city, and he himself crossed the border as a new immigrant in 1961, the lens of his scope is broader. It rises from the earth and blurs fences, walls, and checkpoints, granting him a distinctly global perspective on the Americas. But make no mistake, Alurista hovers over AztlГЎn—the concept he wove permanently into the vocabulary of Chicano letters. Alurista sees the Chicano in all of us. As we graduate from the institutions that historically have excluded us, we are “breathing / in zapata’s gown”; and as we move through occupied America, we must do so proudly porque

nos pertenecen las calles, el barrio the phone posts and electric bulbs the mailboxes are ours to use in the afternoon a letter send to other chicanos, with blood seal it. Dare we state, at the risk of sentimentalizing, that Alurista loves his gente, his gente’s history, culture, language, and roots that have dug so deep into the soil, they cannot be removed: “¡aquГ- estamos / y no nos vamos!” He demands, furthermore, “let hunger die / on the tongue,” yes, and let our hearts pump the life into our lungs to blare out: ВЎviva la raza! ВЎque viva! que viva, pa’ siempre. This unembarrassed, unapologetic zeal por la comunidad is necessary once again. It was once the lifeblood of the social and political battles of el Movimiento, and then something happened once the dust settled, a type of lull or acquiescence in our activism. For the last three decades we have allowed el Movimiento to be shelved into the annals of Chicano history, calling it our past—a time we can romanticize and look back upon to measure how far we have come. As we acknowledge our own complexities, and the flaws of that first generation of Chicano leadership, as we recognize our own diversity and alliance with other ethnic groups, as we move into positions of academic, administrative, and bureaucratic significance, that time, that language, and that word—Chicano—are becoming archaic. The new Chicano has Page 22 →become a paper revolutionary. The new Chicano has become polite. The new Chicano has become an insider. The new Chicano has become a Latino. The new Chicano occupies a comfort zone, where identity and language are concepts, where the weapon of choice is jargon and dialogue is insular and incomprehensible to those outside of the intellectual circles locked around the new Chicano center: academia. The hard-won privilege of tenure has become so precious, the new Chicano is afraid to rock the boat. When the new Chicano writes, either academically or creatively, it is done with caution, with every stick of dynamite missing its fuse. Thankfully, many artists have not lost their sensory perception of the real world and the preoccupations that burden our communities at large. Thankfully, they communicate with the populations outside of the university grounds. Thankfully, poets like Alurista have remained unafraid to mix the gunpowder into their ink. And now that the political posturing against undocumented aliens and immigration reform has once again come to the fore as one of the most charged issues in our current affairs, it’s time to fuel the writing utensils, to look to the poems of discontent and also write new ones: “and the verbo / b / struggle!” I’m suddenly reminded of Alurista’s poem “mantra,” with its clear references to California’s Proposition 187 of 1994 (the ballot initiative designed to deny “illegal” immigrants social services, health care, and public education) and to Governor Pete Wilson, who helped push it forward: wilsonitis is an ingrown epidemic in the heart of aztlГЎn

187 its pus. New diseases plague us, though the symptoms stay the same. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s that our adversaries are not only the conservatives but the liberals as well. Note the unpardonable oversight of the Library of America’s two-volume anthology Reporting Civil Rights, released in 2003: covering the historical movement from 1941 to 1973, Page 23 →not once is CГ©sar ChГЎvez or the Chicano Movement mentioned. More recently, in the 2007 release of the fifteen-hour PBS documentary The War, produced by Ken Burns, focused on the World War II veteran experience, not once does it turn its lens toward the Latino soldier. Twenty-eight minutes were added to the documentary after a public outcry from the Chicano /Latino community, and though it’s only a gesture, it demonstrates how we have to speak out constantly or be erased permanently. These betrayals are in the realm of the arts; they are more egregious in politics and society. Alurista has always been conscious of that, which is why his harshest critiques are directed at the Republican governments in Sacramento and in the White House. And since that party has been camped out in the Oval Office for five out of the last seven presidential terms, there’s been much cause for protest. Thankfully, we have always had our champion demonstrator, Alurista. Certain personal data about Alurista has been stated and restated in many biographical entries, critical studies, essays, and book introductions, such as the curious compression of his name (from Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia), his birth in Mexico in 1947, and his eventual relocation to California at the age of thirteen. He is alternately referred to as “the poet laureate of AztlГЎn” or the “poeta-maestro,” both fitting titles given the significance of his artistic and political contributions to el Movimiento Chicano of the late sixties and early seventies. Besides his consistent creative output, in 1967, while a student at San Diego State University, he cofounded MEChA, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de AztlГЎn. He helped draft El Plan Espiritual de AztlГЎn of 1969, giving it its title and preamble on that fateful March day in Denver, Colorado, at the First National Chicano Liberation Youth Conference hosted by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales. In 1977 he founded and edited Maize, an early journal (and later small press) dedicated to Chicano and Third World literature and criticism that also sponsored the first Floricanto festivities. He continues to be a connecting bridge to that critical period of Chicano activism because he is still alive and still writing, his words the best steel on the toes of the protest boot. Many other veterans have not made it this far. The list of deceased literary leaders is long and too sad to contemplate, but I will name a few Page 24 →notable poets: TomГЎs Rivera, Lalo Delgado, Ricardo SГЎnchez, Gloria AnzaldГєa, and the aforementioned “Corky” Gonzales. Indeed, that generation of writers is dying off, and their legacies will soon be forgotten if the next generation does not remember and honor them. And so, Alurista, a poet excluded from the anthologies of American literature, continues his journey, unhindered. And now this opportunity, presented to me by Gary Keller, the longtime editor at Bilingual Press, to select and edit an anthology of Alurista’s work. The selections in the proposed anthology are culled specifically from three books and one unpublished manuscript—the four projects submitted to the editorial offices at Bilingual Press, Alurista’s most frequent publishing home. The final product, Xicano Duende: A Select Anthology, is a commemoration, then, of a relationship that spans approximately a quarter of a century: Return: Poems Collected and New, which includes the volumes Nationhood Plumaroja and Dawn’s Eye, was published in 1982; Z Eros in 1995; Et TГєВ .В .В . Raza? in 1996; and the newer selections come from the manuscript Tunaluna, which was completed in 2005 but was eventually published in 2010 with AztlГЎn Libre Press. As the editor of Alurista’s new publication, I kept the material ordered chronologically to illustrate how Alurista’s work evolved and moved with the times. I was particularly drawn to the poems referencing the changing players in the political arena. In the end, this strategy demonstrates that although Alurista’s risks with language have evolved, his pro-raza, antiRepublican stance, unapologetic and proud, has remained consistent throughout his writing career. A man of firm convictions.

Additionally, these selections design a slightly different avenue of approach to the poetics of Alurista, an alternative to the two popular readings of his work. Indeed, I am redirecting the reader away from two widely held interpretations: that his poetry radiates from an Amerindian consciousness and that he’s an “experimental” poet. For the longest time I, too, accepted these notions and helped to circulate them whenever I was asked about Alurista, especially in regard to the second interpretive lens. But I am a believer that Page 25 →the longevity and lasting significance of a poet rest on how the changing times find fresh relevance in a poet’s work. The Amerindian consciousness present in Alurista’s work exists in terms of references to a pre-Columbian culture and spirituality, at times achieved simply by word-dropping (“ehecatl,” “madredtierra,” and “quetzal,” for example), at others by generating a chant-like prayer down the page, as in the poem “Bones of Courage”: mother tierra tierra tierra tierra tierra amerindia amerindia amerindia call forth the sun. I see it more as an invitation to inhabit the memory of indigenousness than a plea to redefine identity in terms of it: that is, to remember that Chicano roots are Indio roots, as Gloria AnzaldГєa states in Borderlands/La Frontera, and that the soul’s harmony is linked to the ground we walk on. So, too, disharmony, since we are treading over the lands of conflict. Resolution, then, or at least the strength for survival, comes from the recognition that we are of the Americas and that the Americas is ours. We belong here, before and after la migra, the Border Patrol, the INS, the Department of Homeland Security, and whatever name comes next. Alurista is asking us to see the Indio within, not to channel or adopt a pre-Columbian past life but to move through the present on the strength and perseverance of our indigenous ancestors. The “experimentalism” is actually a misnomer, a misidentification of Alurista’s wordplay, which leans heavily toward the intralingual pun: “he ran” / “irГЎn;” “notice” / “not ice”; “do it” / “duet”; “ex-ostiГіn” and “quet zal.” And then there are those gems that he mines with more patience and aplomb, as in the poem “no prophet”: Page 26 →malcolm, kennedy and zapata died chГЎvez died peacefully without boxing gloves or golden belts

jackson prevails bush burns and quail hides. The second reason he might be categorized as experimental is the way he configures many of his poems on the page, allowing the written word to claim white space (a verbal irony that’s not lost on Alurista, I’m certain). His later work takes more risks in this respect. This device creates a different kind of energy in a poem, mirroring the kind of energy exerted at the public reading of it. And then, of course, there is the nature of his vocabulary, which draws from Spanish, English, Spanglish, CalГі, and so on, challenging the audience and readership. One cannot be a passive recipient of the words if those words are curveballs thrown at every linguistic terrain. One has to move to where that ball is aimed. And one has to “b” as fast. That “b”—the gut letter, or rather, the letter with guts—makes its ubiquitous presence in Alurista’s published work as of the late seventies. It accompanies the other word-letters U and R, the now widely accepted shorthand used in Internet instant messages and cell phone texts, before these tools were as commonplace as they are now. Alurista was not the first to use these, though he was adopting the practice used by hip-hop, rap, and other urban artists. This clearly signifies a spoken-word influence, if not alliance, a reaffirmation of the sensibilities of the oral poetry that made him a popular performer at the height of el Movimiento and when his Floricanto en AztlГЎn was released in 1971. Perhaps it is this fluidity of language and structure, this dynamic multilingualism, that sets Alurista apart from any other Chicano poet. The more comparable voice would be that of Juan Felipe Herrera, a cohort of Alurista since they were in junior high. I would like to point out, however, that my frame of reference is the former generation of established poets who Page 27 →managed to survive erasure and the unfortunate memory loss of the Chicano community. If we do not remember, they did not survive. I’m hopeful that the next generation will fare better. In the contemporary milieu, there are a number of young voices, a new crop of spoken-word activists, who remind me of Alurista and Juan Felipe Herrera. Among them: Tim Z. HernГЎndez (author of Skin Tax), Luis Humberto Valadez (author of what I’m on), and the two Bilingual Press poets Brenda CГЎrdenas (author of Boomerang) and UrayoГЎn Noel (author of Kool Logic/La lГіgica kool). All of these writers are text-based poets with roots or sensibilities stemming from the spoken-word/performance-based traditions. Thus, outside the avenues of Amerindianness and experimentalism, that leaves us walking through the more contentious road: Alurista as political poet. But to state simply that Alurista is a “political poet” is to diminish his long career into a reductive category and to cast him into an old and useless debate (put forth by the literary snobbery in our own community or by the easily threatened Anglo one) in which anything smattering of politics is dismissed as propaganda or didacticism. And critics can certainly accuse Alurista of those things, but that won’t take away from the fact that he has endured, that his voice and his words have been with us for the past four decades. As of the writing of this introduction, only six Chicano/Latino poets have published comprehensive volumes of a career’s worth of poetry: Gary Soto (1995), MartГ-n Espada (2003), Virgil SuГЎrez (2005), Luis J. RodrГ-guez (2005), Ray Gonzalez (2005), and Juan Felipe Herrera (2008). None by a Latina, though Judith Ortiz Cofer, Pat Mora, and Alma Luz Villanueva have had as prolific writing careers as the aforementioned men. In the Anglo literary world, where careers, especially those of educated white men, have been thriving in the twentieth century, the collected and selected volumes are a given rite of passage. And though I am pleased that our literary community is now adopting this career marker, my wish is that it doesn’t repeat the gender imbalance of the Anglo one. I do recognize, however, that one obstacle is the gender imbalance that already exists in Latino letters, where poetry is dominated by men, but not prose—that genre is well represented by women. Page 28 →These strides, however, don’t necessarily mean that the industry of American letters will change. Chicano/Latino writers as an artistic population continue to fly under the radar. We continue to be ignored by

book reviewers, award-granting committees, and, most disappointingly, by our own Chicano/Latino literary scholars, who keep their noses fixed on the same select group of established writers and completely overlook the newer voices. Our solace is that we cannot be silenced by indifference. We soldier on. The creative instinct does not depend on literary prizes or fame, it does not breathe because of criticism, but it does depend on the community’s memory for a fully realized life. Remember us. How fitting that Alurista’s volume of poems will descend on the Americas by 2010, in time for the next revolution. According to Mexico’s historical cycle (there was a revolution in 1810, there was another in 1910), 2010 is the year of reckoning. It is also the year of the next U.S. census. How this revolution will take shape in this millennium is yet to be seen, but we will see it. Perhaps it will be the much-maligned Reconquista after all—a south-of-the-border population invasion given that two-thirds of the estimated forty-four-plus million Latinos in the United States are of Mexican descent. It’s projected that by 2050 that number will exceed one hundred million. Perhaps by then the demographic shift will finally manifest itself in the artistic community, encompassing everything from music, television, and cinema to literature and the visual arts, as this country addresses the needs of its second dominant group. Who knows? Possibilities are also uncertainties. But what is certain is that Chicano poets will be there to witness it, document it, critique it, reconstruct it, and make art of it. Private or public, personal or political, poetry will preserve us. Works Cited Alurista. Et TГєВ .В .В . Raza? Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 1996. Alurista. Floricanto en AztlГЎn. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Center, 1971. Page 29 →Alurista. Return: Poems Collected and New. Ypsilanti, MI: Bilingual Press, 1982. Alurista. Tunaluna. San Antonio, TX: AztlГЎn Libre Press, 2010. Alurista. Xicano Duende: A Select Anthology. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2011. Alurista. Z Eros. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 1995. AnzaldГєa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. CГЎrdenas, Brenda. Boomerang. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2009. HernГЎndez, Tim Z. Skin Tax. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2005. Noel, UrayoГЎn. Kool Logic/La lГіgica kool. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2005. Valadez, Luis Humberto. what I’m on. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009.

Page 30 →

The Twenty-First-Century Queer Chicano Poetics of Eduardo C. Corral Shortly after the announcement was made public in early 2011 that Eduardo C. Corral’s manuscript Slow Lightning had been selected by contest judge Carl Phillips to become volume 106 in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, I pitched the story to Poets & Writers magazine. After all, Corral was the first Latino to be selected for that series, stepping through a door that had been mostly shut to poets of color. Before Corral, the series had included only two Chinese American poets, Cathy Song (vol. 78) and Ken Chen (vol. 104), one Palestinian American poet, Fady Joudah (vol. 102), and one African American poet, Margaret Walker (vol. 41). But the angle was not that a Latino had finally achieved such an honor, but rather that a Chicano had done so. Corral self-identified as a Chicano (or Xicano), which meant that politically he was an activist, versed in the culture, history, and literary legacy of the Mexican American community, and that he took that knowledge and sensibility to the artistic endeavor: the pop culture allusions, the code-switching, and the engagement of charged topics such as undocumented immigration, to name a few elements. Yet Chicano poets had been laboring on the page since the term Chicano had been adopted during the rise of the great social movements of the 1960s. What then made Corral’s work so timely and attractive in a twenty-first-century context? He also identified as queer, adding yet more richness and possibility to his vision. Corral was a queer Chicano. Was that it? It seemed too pat of an explanation, particularly since Corral was not the first writer to weave ethnicity and sexuality into art. How was Corral’s approach so notable, so prize-worthy? Page 31 →Two statements shed light upon the craft of the poetics of Eduardo C. Corral. The first was made by Carl Phillips in his introduction to Slow Lightning: “In Corral’s refusal to think in reductive terms lies his great authority.” The second, made by Corral himself in the Poets & Writers profile: “There was no separating my queerness from my Xicanoness from my maleness from my working-classness—identity is complex and when I started writing poems I wanted them to be complex, to have no borders even though I write about them.” Therein the beginning of this examination: how a young gay man from Casa Grande, Arizona, son of undocumented Mexican immigrants, went on to pen one of the first important works of Latino literature in the new millennium. How fitting that Corral open Slow Lightning with an ekphrastic poem, a poem based on a work of art titled Our Completion by the queer Mexican-born painter Tino RodrГ-guez. RodrГ-guez’s works are homoerotic representations of pain and desire, influenced by Catholicism and surrealism but also by world mythologies and fairy tales, with a particular interest in bridging the animal form to the human body. The painting in question shows a fawn-like figure wearing a crown of flowers, eyes like a cat’s, devouring a bird. The physical act is the satiating of both bodily hunger and sexual appetite. The fluidity of this animal-human relationship gestures toward the transformations of Greek myth and to the Amerindian indigenous animal spirits or nahualismo—the animal soul manifested in dream, story, and art. Another name for this fluidity of influences and dialogues is borderlessness. The kinship to RodrГ-guez’s artistry is apparent in Corral’s own brushstrokes. The poem too draws a series of surrealist images that detail a courtship between two lovers. But then comes a series of breaks or disruptions from the established path, making the poem difficult to summarize or categorize. First the poem shifts to a list of three references whose nuances require some familiarity with the Spanish language (“Sin vergГјenza”—literally, shameless, though depending on tone also a coy reprimand), with Mexican vernacular (“Escuintle”—from the Nahuatl xoloescuintle, a hairless dog, though also street slang for a young boy, that is, a kid), and with Mexica/Aztec mythology (“He Who Makes Things Sprout”—the proverbial name of Tlaloc, the Aztec rain god). Page 32 →A second dramatic turn occurs when the poem mentions Emily Dickinson’s book, quoting a Prince song on the margins as a mischievous defilement inked in by the lover: “she had a pocketful of horses / Trojan / & some of them used.” These references will tickle the reader who knows something of Dickinson’s reputation as the reclusive belle of Amherst, and if the reader catches on to the double entendre behind the proper name Trojan. But the major feat is in observing how Corral, in a matter of four lines, draws connecting paths

between three languages (English, Spanish, and Nahuatl), two mythologies (Aztec and Greek), a nineteenthcentury poet (Dickinson), a twentieth-century musician (Prince), and a name-brand prophylactic (Trojan condoms). The poem concludes with two sentences in Spanish followed by a surrealist movement in English: in Spanish, the speaker makes of the beloved a religious or mythological icon depicted with “old bones” to his left and “maps made of skin” to his right; in English, this figure plucks petals (i.e., words/moans/evidence of sensual contact between teeth and crown of flowers) out of the speaker’s mouth. Indeed, the speaker’s completion is not only the intimate connection with a significant other but a nourishing navigation through a highly cultured imaginative landscape. The defiance of a monolingual or, dare I say it, “straight” narrative is usually wielded by the use of language—when Corral shifts into Spanish or CalГі (Chicano slang), such as his use of the phrase “QuГ© chido” (roughly, “how cool”) in the anaphoric part of the poem “Variation on a Theme by JosГ© Montoya.” Yet these movements are seamless to a speaker/reader who is not monolingual. The use of multiple languages can be unsettling, but the purpose is not to leave the reader with a feeling of alienation after this encounter; rather, Corral invites the reader to enter the territory of the borderlands, where such linguistic auditory experiences are commonplace. When in the borderlands, listen to border-speak. Such is the case with the aforementioned poem “Variation on a Theme by JosГ© Montoya,” with its series of movements—linguistic, structural, and tonal. A few words on Corral’s literary influence JosГ© Montoya and his most well-known poem, “El Louie.” Montoya (born 1932) is a noted painter, musician, and graphic artist who was raised Page 33 →in central California. A Korean War veteran, he dedicated most of his adult life to art education at California State University–Sacramento. A prominent political voice in the Chicano arts movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, he published his poetry and illustrations in small press venues. A commemorative volume of his poems along with a portfolio of sketches, mostly of Chicanos—pachucos, cholos, and vatos—was published by Chusma House in 1992 with the title Information: 20 Years of Joda (joda is slang for hard-won labor). “El Louie” is Montoya’s most well-known poem, which “embodied a prevalent [Chicano] Movement ethos of masculine resistance against the forces of oppression and inequity.” First published in 1970, this elegy hails the down-on-his-luck barrio figure as a working-class hero, a conscious antidote to the demonization and criminalization of the barrio male, whose urban attire over the years (e.g., zoot suits, baggy pants, white undershirts employed as outerwear, hair nets, tattoos) has been used against him to stereotype an image of a ruffian or gang member. The poem’s opening stanzas set the stage for a more vulnerable depiction of a man, a war veteran who pawned his Bronze Star to buy liquor, who died not in action (either in Korea or on the streets of the barrio) but “alone in a rented room”: Hoy enterraron al Louie. And San Pedro o san pinche Are in for it. And those Times of the forties And the early fifties Lost un vato de atolle [sic]. Kind of slim and drawn, There toward the end, Ageing [sic] fast from too much

Booze y la vida dura. But Class to the end. Corral’s “variation” is a nine-part series, each section structurally different, each tapping into a different emotional tone, from sullen to humorous. The opening is an obvious nod to Montoya: “Hoy enterraron al Monchie. / El Mero Mero de Durango. Page 34 →Mister / No Contaron Con Mi Astucia.” Both poems begin with the announcement of a burial—El Louie’s and El Monchie’s—but Corral situates El Monchie’s heritage as specifically Mexican (he’s from the state of Durango in northern Mexico) and also alludes to a fictional underdog and Mexican comic Roberto GГіmez BolaГ±os’s most popular television creation, El ChapulГ-n Colorado (The Red Grasshopper), who always proclaimed his presence after hearing a cry for help with the phrase “¡No contaron con mi astucia!” (You didn’t count on my cunning!). The comedic affect is heightened by the fact that El ChapulГ-n was an out-of-shape, undersized, bumbling fool. He was, however, willing to help. So, too, El Monchie must have been somewhat of a quirky character—for those who shared with him the drudgery of working-class life, all the greater the loss. Unlike El Louie, El Monchie is killed by a bullet, though the deliverer of the elegy asserts: “Tell los chismosos naco / but not narco” (Tell the gossips, a poor bloke but not a drug trafficker). The subsequent sections provide the more colorful details of El Monchie’s life—his undocumented border crossing, his quick acculturation upon arrival (“Gold necklaces. / DГіlar / store cologne.”), his restaurant job, six roommates in the “wetback’s motel,” and the stories that made of El Monchie a legend among his peers, like when he came upon a scarecrow dressed as a border agent, so he hung a piece of paper on it with an inscription in blood: “Pancho / Was Here.” The “QuГ© Chido” anaphora follows, and it’s essentially a list of the small things that gave El Monchie great joy and that reaffirmed his zest, masculinity, and youth. Presumably, El Monchie was one of those daring undocumented aliens who crossed the border repeatedly, fearlessly defying the dangers of the desert, the risk of getting caught or even killed. And then he is killed, though the mystery of his death becomes part of the borderlands lore, his story commemorated by Corral’s variation of a corrido, a border folk song whose purpose is to record, remember, and spread the word, just like Montoya’s elegy to El Louie. The corrido, usually the tale of a tragic loss set to a somber tune, is underscored when El Monchie is buried in Orizaba, his hometown, wearing “a Dodgers jersey, / necklaces de oro [of gold], / snakeskin botas [boots]”—the attire of a young fallen Page 35 →hero from the borderlands who cherishes symbols from both sides of the international line. El Monchie’s father, mourning the death of his young son, tosses “a fistful of silver bullets” on the coffin instead of dirt—symbol of wasted virility. Corral concludes the poem with trumpet wails and accordion moans as the speaker channels El Monchie’s voice: “me voy a Los Angeles porque no quiero olvidar mi MГ©xico” (I am off to LA because I don’t want to forget my Mexico). Though El Louie and El Monchie are tales shaped fifty years apart, there’s something disconcerting in the fact that Chicano/Mexicano masculinity, and indeed, fate, continues to be shaped by international economics and politics—forces beyond anyone’s control. Yet there’s also something comforting in the notion that the poem, or song, like a commemorative descanso (a site-specific cluster of flowers and religious relics that mark a tragic event and loss of life) continues to provide a space for solace, memory, and reflection. By nodding to Montoya, Corral is not only acknowledging a literary forefather and the scaffolding that he and other Chicano veteran writers have provided future generations to build upon, he is also introducing new readers to a classic Chicano poem. This is literary activism at its most effective: reinforcing the need and influence of the poetics of an early Chicano writer and then using those tools to expand the reach of Chicano creativity past the borderlands and into Mexican territory. This is a subtle but particularly important gesture given that over the decades Chicano poets, like second- and third-generation children of immigrants, have moved steadily away from Mexico, become situated north of the border, and made a concerted effort to define themselves apart from Mexican identity. But for Corral, whose work is located on the borderlands, there are no demarcations in culture,

history, memory, or imagination. El Monchie is a clear reminder that the immigrant experience, no matter where and when it’s sung, still rings loud and familiar. As a queer poet, Corral doesn’t resist, however, an opportunity to queer the stories of the border. One of the most arresting examples is the poem “Want.” What begins as a retelling of the border crossing of the speaker’s father, in which, out of desperation and hunger, the man devoured the entrails of a blue lizard, Page 36 →cleverly turns into a testimony of the speaker’s first sexual encounter: “the first / time I knelt for a man, my / lips pressed to his zipper, / I suffered such hunger.” Besides establishing an echo of the Tino RodrГ-guez painting that opensSlow Lighting, this poem is the speaker’s touching attempt to relate to his father’s life-saving, relief-granting gesture to his own primal urge and emotional release. The kneeling is both genuflection and answered prayer. The father makes other notable appearances in the book, and it’s important to note that unlike the story of rejection often heard when a man finds out his son is gay, particularly in the Chicano/Mexican cultural context of machismo—indeed, El Mochie’s loss to his father also represents a curtailing of the family line, hence the discarded bullets—Corral opens a space for a more positive experience, one that doesn’t reiterate the straight father–gay son paradigm of violence and abuse. In the poem “In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes,” for example, the father, who was “smuggled into the United States,” is lovingly celebrated as a resourceful worker with a philosophical streak: “he said: The heart can only be broken // once, like a window.” The father’s work ethic, his knack for strumming the guitar and crooning corridos, creates a positive role model for the son, who wears his father’s shirt when he walks through the desert, declaring proudly, “He’s an illegal. / I’m an illegal-American.” It is this same father who, in the poem “Ditat Deus,” teaches his son how to make love to a man by allowing him to perform such intimate gestures as unlacing his work boots and lathering his face before a shave. The poem “To a Jornalero Cleaning out My Neighbor’s Garage” extrapolates on that father-son-lover triangulation. (I am using the term’s mathematical definition metaphorically: the establishment of location or orientation by referencing the location of two other points.) After determining that his father’s identity and that of the day laborer are both similar (undocumented, working class) and dissimilar (the day laborer is younger, a more recent arrival, whereas the speaker’s father has seen his son through graduate school), the speaker gives himself permission to eroticize the nameless stranger: “Are your hands / always so dirty? / Slip a finger in my mouth. / I’ll devour the Page 37 →grime / under the nail.” The magical properties and abilities once attributed to the father (“If I ask for a goldfish, he spits a glob of phlegm / into a jar of water.”) are transferred to the newest object of the speaker’s affection: when the jornalero walks out of the garage, holding a French horn, the speaker sees “a butcher / in El Dorado holding / the golden entrails of a cattle.” In a sense, in order to claim full agency of his sexuality, the son needs to leave the father and find possibility outside of his childhood home, even if it is just next door. Unburdened by social or religious pressures, the speaker is free to dream, desire, and imagine. Perhaps the lines of the poem “Saint Anthony’s Church” say it best: “Instead of the nailed palms of Christ, / my father’s warm hand on my shoulder.” Corral takes a more elliptical approach to examining sexuality in the set of two poems by the same haunting title, “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.” These surreal pieces leave much room for interpretation—there is no clear narrative even if the poems are syntactically constructed to read as such. The title “AIDS” establishes a context that might direct a particular reading but does little else to illuminate a path toward meaning. Like dream imagery, the series of animals and musical instruments that populate the poems remain locked inside their concrete bodies. Though the reader will appreciate the beauty of Corral’s lines—“I’ll cut the hard strings / for my mandolin, use the frame as a window / in a chapel / yet to be built”—it’s futile to impose definition on a poem whose elegance is in the art of composition. Perhaps as conceptual pieces, the antithesis of death, decay, and darkness, the poems are acts of vibrancy, song, and light. The second “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” poem is slightly more generous in its engagement of the title because of the invocation of the wall clocks when the speaker jars awake (presumably from a nightmare) next to his lover. The poem follows the speaker into another surreal scenario in which he finds himself

alone, naked and vulnerable, staring “at the slowest lightning, / the stars.” This state of reflective loneliness harkens to the poem just before this one, another ekphrastic piece called “Untitled (Perfect Lovers): Two Commercial Clocks: FГ©lix GonzГЎlez-Torres: 1987–1989.” Page 38 →GonzГЎlez-Torres (1957–96) was an HIV+ Cuban-born visual artist known for his minimal installations and sculptures. The piece that inspired Corral is simply two clocks hung side by side and set in motion simultaneously after being equipped with new batteries. In theory, the expectation is that two clocks set in motion with the same exact time will also stop running or “die” at the same time. The reality is that there are unknown variables such as battery life or some weakness within the operating mechanism that inevitably force one clock to die before the other. Translated into a human context: no matter how earnestly a couple pledges “forever,” one person usually dies before the other. The installation invites viewers to watch the two clocks tick in unison until eventually one clock slows down to a complete stop. The second clock has to tick on without its partner until it too dies. Though Corral was a young man at the height of the AIDS pandemic, this troubling chapter is an important part of his queer community’s history. He chooses, however, to dialogue with one of the more touching illustrations of love and loss, indeed, a focus on promise and commitment over sex and disease. Corral’s poem is shaped like another of GonzГЎlez-Torres’s installations, “Untitled” (America), 1994, which is essentially a curtain of light bulbs set to appear as if it is cascading down to a pool of light on the floor. The lines of the poem cascade down the page in a pattern of intervals, each a graceful illumination and one coy wink: the “darner amberwing skimmer” are three families of Arizona dragonflies. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention at this point the critical role the Sonoran Desert landscape plays in shaping the imagery of Corral’s work. If thirst and hunger (literal and metaphorical) are the tropes that weave throughout the collection, they cling to the water, which travels like a character through the book. A few examples: in the poem “Watermark,” an ode to the speaker’s mother, “Rain pierced her womb / when she was six months pregnant. Rain / singed / the face of her child”; in “Velvet Mesquite” the speaker rolls his r’s in words like arroyo to “coax / the engine into a roar”; and in the elegy “To a Mojado Who Died Crossing the Desert” the saguaros “glisten / like mint trombones” and “Sometimes a gust of snow / floats across the Page 39 →water / as gracefully as a bride.” Corral doesn’t simply drop the desert’s characteristics as mere adjectives, he creates active and surprising images that match the stunning, albeit temperamental nature of the borderlands. The well-read reader will notice that besides drawing inspiration from the Chicano and queer artist communities, Corral invokes a series of prominent names in the field of poetry: Jean Valentine, Bei Dao, Donald Justice, and most importantly, Robert Hayden. Hayden (1913–80) was an acclaimed African American writer who left behind a small but notable body of poetry. A volume of his collected poems (just short of two hundred pages) was published in 1985, edited by his former student Frederick Glaysher. As a literary mentor, Hayden’s appeal to Corral might be traced to a few biographical details: Hayden, a native of Detroit, also came from a poor, working-class upbringing and attended college at Wayne State University with the help of a scholarship. Those modest beginnings did not hinder him from becoming a prominent critic and scholar, particularly in his examination of African American history and folk culture. Hayden later enrolled in graduate school at the University of Michigan, where he studied with W. H. Auden. It bears noting that although Hayden privileged the descriptive “American poet” over “black poet,” he didn’t shy away from writing about such racialized issues as slavery and urban poverty. He embraced “American poet” as a designation of possibility, of permission to venture into subject matter and emotion that weren’t particularly bound to race, class, or ethnicity. This is an old debate but still a struggle for many writers of color: the politics of labels and what kinds of expectations and limitations they create. As a side note, it’s worth mentioning that Auden himself didn’t write about sexuality, though it was common knowledge even in his time that he was a homosexual. What is evident is that through the love for poetry, Auden and Hayden were able to transcend their differences and shape a productive mentorship. For Corral, when he embraces “queer Chicano,” he does it as a political act, insisting on queering ethnicity and racializing

sexuality. To reiterate his explanation: “identity is complex and when I started writing poems I wanted them to be complex, to have no borders even though I write about them.” This stance, Page 40 →however, would not have been made possible without those moments of articulation, courage, and resistance—what is now called literary activism—from poets like Montoya and Hayden. As a literary descendant of poets like Montoya and Hayden, Corral is defining his literary activism on his own terms. As an influence on Corral, two of Hayden’s poems immediately come to mind. The first is the oftenanthologized “Those Winter Sundays,” in which the speaker honors the sacrifice of his hard-working father by finally acknowledging the thankless gestures a parent performs for a child, like driving out the cold and polishing his shoes by the time the child awoke. The son, sentimental and slightly regretful, concludes, “what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices.” The traces of this paternal love are highlighted repeatedly in Slow Lightning, underscored by the fact that the father’s border crossing, like many border crossings, was done at great risk and sacrifice to the self for the sake of the family, of the next generation. The second Hayden poem is “Bone-Flower Elegy.” Dreamlike and surreal, the poem follows the speaker as he moves through the winding catacombs of a house and past a series of sensual encounters: actors in vulture masks performing sexualized scenes, a nude corpse that comes alive on its coffin, a desert landscape with skull flowers that ensnare the speaker, caging me for you beastangel raging toward me angelbeast shining come to rend me and redeem.В The beastangel/angelbeast is no less than a shape-shifting demon lover that promises both pleasure and pain. From this promise of a transformative experience, Corral responded with two poems dedicated “To the Beastangel” and “To the Angelbeast,” respectively. The first poem channels Hayden’s nude corpse coming alive in the throes of passion: “I asked once for a father. You gave me a wreathe.” A series of gestures follow, suggesting foreplay and consummation, reaching back (yet again) to the book’s opening poem, “Our Completion,” when the beastangel crushes a finch, spilling its entrails. The speaker, identifyingPage 41 → with the surrender, coos, “At your touch, my nipples / open like bird beaks.” By contrast, the interaction with the angelbeast is more conversation than action, more intellectual encounter than physical, though this journey too leads back to the caged speaker of Hayden’s poem when the speaker asks, “Am I not your animal?” Extending the dialogue with Hayden even further, Corral includes a poem simply titled “To Robert Hayden, ” in which the speaker imagines a romance with the renowned poet in a hotel near Chicago: Face down, eyes shut, you breathed in the aroma of sweat & allspice coming off the sheets.

Readers might be taken aback by this bravado, but only if this rendezvous cannot be read as a metaphorical lovemaking, a stimulating exchange with a poet’s creativity. That the encounter takes on a decidedly homoerotic turn, however, troubles the platonic context that usually comes with such declarations of affection or love for a work of art or for an artistic mind. Corral is keenly aware of this and, once again, invites the reader to step forward and reflect on any discomfort or anxiety that such an admission stirs. This is in keeping with Corral’s modus operandi: never let the reading experience become passive, never let the dust settle on the ink on the page—a characteristic learned from the ever-shifting sands of the Sonoran Desert. I come full circle to Carl Phillips’s assertion: “In Corral’s refusal to think in reductive terms lies his great authority.” Indeed, those convenient labels and categories that might have given easy access to the reader are paths too narrow for a poet like Corral, who refuses to pander to one audience or another. Instead of gestures of condescension, he demands that his readers be just as cultured as the writer, or at the very least, be willing to learn from the experience of contact with different languages, stories, and knowledges. That he also insists on calling himself Page 42 →a queer Chicano serves as a starting point for inquiry—it announces that there are multiple lenses to his artistic vision and mission, and therefore multiple doorways into a poem, though he trusts that the good reader will be able to cross through more than one. A final example: in the poem “Self-Portrait with Tumbling and Lasso,” the poem ends with the lines “I’m kicking back / my legs, like a mule. I’m kicking up / my legs, like / a showgirl.” Are those kicks defensive reflexes or a cagey dance? Is the speaker more like a beast of burden or like a stage performer? In the borderlessness of Corral’s poetics, the answer is usually inclusive—none is turned away. Though a more appropriate response might be: what does it matter what the speaker is or is not? What matters is what the speaker says—and does. In the end, Slow Lightning is the product of varied communities. Its intelligence is in expecting that its readers be intelligent. The richness of this book allows it to reward the reader generously. Corral has essentially raised the bar for both the learned writer and the learned reader. In an era when every piece of information is within reach, there is no excuse for accusations of inaccessibility or feelings of alienation; that’s akin to erecting a wall in a space that doesn’t want them. Works Cited Corral, Eduardo C. Slow Lightning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. GonzГЎlez, Rigoberto. “First: Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning.” Poets & Writers, May/June 2012. 67–72. Hayden, Robert. “Bone-Flower Elegy.” Collected Poems. New York: Liveright, 1985. 185. Hayden, Robert. “Those Winter Sundays.” Collected Poems. New York: Liveright, 1985. 40. Montoya, JosГ©. “El Louie.” Information: 20 Years of Joda. San Jose, CA: Chusma House, 1992. 16–18. Phillips, Carl. Foreword. Slow Lightning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. ix–xvi. Villa, RaГєl. “вЂEl Louie’ by JosГ© Montoya: An Appreciation.” A Companion to Latino Studies. Edited by Juan Flores and Ronato Rosaldo. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. 180–84.

Page 43 →

The Double Doors into J. Michael Martinez’s Heredities In genetics, heredity is “the passing of traits from parents or ancestors to offspring.” This is a biological process “by which an offspring cell or organism acquires or becomes predisposed to the characteristics of its parent cell or organism.” This scientific term seems like the most unpoetic word to title a book of poetry, especially when there are less abstract words available, like bloodlines. But take a few steps back from the concept, the clinical language, and suddenly that word—heredities—bears music, a sound that smatters of something mythological, someone Greek. The eye too becomes pulled toward that direction: here deities. And suddenly that title exudes poetry, though the path is not immediate or without initial obstacle, mostly because of the unexpected encounter with the abstract context. Therein lies the challenge and reward of entering the pages of Heredities—a book that weaves, among other seeming mutually exclusive binaries, science into story, intellect into emotion, biological features into cultural identity in order to create an all-inclusive space. That hard-won strategy or poetic sensibility is best illustrated in part 1, which will be the focus of this brief study. “Heredities (I) Etymology,” the section’s first prose poem, opens with a deceptively straightforward stance: “When she was seven, my grandmother suffered from fever and swollen glands.” Those versed in Latino letters will recognize the obligatory “abuelita poem,” which is by now nothing short of a poetic clichГ©: a poem that reaches back to the sentimentalized past in order to present a view of the “old ways,” most likely back in the homeland. When the grandmother opts to consult a curandera instead of undergoing the surgery recommended by the doctors,Page 44 → the poem then slips into another familiar struggle: medical science versus folk healing. The Old World distrust of modern medicine is clearly represented in the girl who, martyr-like, endures the adverse effects of tonsillitis, relying instead on prayer to assuage her pain. In the end, it’s evident that the young girl had to submit to the medical procedure, though in her feverish state she recollects the experience through a very different lens—the magical and the mystical: “when the words no longer fell like seeds from her lips” (which kept her santitos nurtured), the little saints appeal to her tongue for answers. The tongue responds with oneiromancy—a dream that presents a symbolic interpretation of the surgery: “She told me her throat opened in two spots like insect eyes and the names of her children came flying through her wounds like peacocks.” What distinguishes this “abuelita poem” from the typical narrative is that the two versions of the same event—the surgery and the heroic little saints who help free the words that were locked inside the grandmother’s glands—do not collide or contradict each other. The poem does not investigate, refreshingly enough, the conflict or tension between medicine and faith. Rather, it creates a space where both can coexist. The versions even appear to reaffirm one other through the physical evidence: the “tiny scars, like two eyelids stitched closed” that the grandmother shows the speaker, her grandson. Since both the surgery and the dream explain the scars, there’s no reason to doubt that either took place. Had the grandmother wanted to romanticize the episode, she might have erased any mention of doctors or the necessary surgery and let the affliction stand alone as the antagonist in the story. But she didn’t, because even she recognizes that the surgery (side by side with prayer) is what allowed her to continue exercising her faith and what kept her alive—what allowed her to become a mother and, subsequently, a grandmother. Thus, the moral of the grandmother’s story is not the power of religion over medicine but rather the storytelling power of imagination in which medicine and religion can function together as key protagonists on the same stage. Hence etymology, which in this case announces not only the origin of a word (the speaker’s mother’s name, which flew out of the grandmother’s throat) but the origin of a practice: the ability to synchronizePage 45 → dual (or dueling) experiences, creating what can be referred to as “simultaneous space”—a space where events run parallel and are not subject to prioritization. If predisposition is genetically handed down through the bloodlines, the exhibiting of the trait is nurtured through cultural connection. That lesson in recognizing the possibility of simultaneous space is exercised by the grandson in the next poem in Heredities. “Xicano” offers a generational leap to a contemporary term that situates the speaker within the United States and within a politicized consciousness, “the light / shaped by trajectory”—in this case, shaped by the family’s migration, their cultural adaptation, and the progeny’s formal education, which is when most

young people encounter and adopt that identity label, Chicano or Xicano. But by keeping to the concept of simultaneous space, Martinez will eschew another poetic cliché—the “how I became a Xicano” testimonial poem. A trajectory presumes linearity or a sequence of events on a timeline; the poem breaks free of that expectation with a lyrical and fragmented composition that invokes pre-Columbian mythology (EhГ©catl, the Aztec god of the winds) inhabiting the spirit-breath of the newly born/awakened twenty-first-century Xicano. In simultaneous space, the act is not one of reaching back to the romanticized past but of reaching out to the palpable present. In this case, to the deity who, associated with all cardinal directions, cannot be pinned down to time or place—he is omnipresent and therefore inhabits all spaces and dimensions at once. As the Xicano’s choice of godparent, EhГ©catl is an appropriate symbol of the continuity of consciousness, since inquiry (“when sounds exchange questions”) and agency (“when light enters the lung”) are momentums that enable protest and social change. The Xicano “bloodline” is politically selected; its values are not inherited or passed down but rather shared by association. However, the term Xicano is specifically adopted by those of Mexican/Mestizo descent (that it is, of indigenous/Amerindian and Spanish/European heritage), so there is, in the end, an extended family bloodline at work. Perhaps this is why that “quail’s wing” is invoked at the end of the poem: the quail has two families in its general order—the Old World Phasianidae and the New World Odontophoridae. In any case, Martinez’s “how I became a Xicano” poem is communicatedPage 46 → not as an obvious narrative but through a series of suggestive symbols and fragments of moments not bound to time or place, except that the experience is housed within a demonym that does signal a particular history and geography, indeed, a particular trajectory. In brief, the poem is both lyrical and narrative. Lest Martinez sentimentalize the empowered state of attaining Xicano consciousness as unconditionally blissful, he inserts an intriguing declaration just before the end of the poem: “when given // the noun: a variable absence.” A variable is “subject to variation or changes” or “a symbolic name associated with a value and whose associated value may be changed.” But what is said to be variable is absence as in absence of Xicano-ness. On one level, for many, arriving to the word Xicano is a kind of homecoming, a migrant’s or wanderer’s coming to terms, like a bird on a nest, to a mythic place (AztlГЎn) that promises to foster community and safety, attaining visibility, stability, or presence. Yet the suggestion in that phrase variable absence appears to imply that the adoption of a name is not enough to be “fixed” to this cultural identity and its promises—that it is possible for a Xicano not to become completely accepted into the nest. For a person of Mexican descent not to be fully included in Xicano space, one of two prejudices within the Xicano community immediately comes to mind: a prejudice against those who don’t speak Spanish and a prejudice against those who are light-skinned. Thus the phrase hints at an interesting tension (when a Xicano is not a Xicano—a conflicted simultaneous space indeed), which is examined more closely in the poems “He Name Me Miklo” and “White.” Even a superficial sweep of Xicano buzzwords reveals a high value placed on skin pigmentation: Brown Pride, Brown & Proud, the Brown Berets, and so on. This amplified appreciation of color is a response to indigenous oppression and skin-color discrimination that spans centuries in the Americas. The oppressors and discriminators are the colonizers and their mestizo progeny—their whiteness a marker of privilege and power. The politics of skin color is not a remnant of the past, since racism and discrimination continue to be a social ill in the contemporary Americas. Therefore the dynamics of Otherness (identifying it, placing it within societal and political hierarchies) can Page 47 →still be employed as a troubling method of social interaction. For the speaker of “He Name Me Miklo,” his experience is in feeling like an outsider to the “Brown & Proud” because of his difference in skin color. The poem’s epigraph explains that miklo is slang for a “Hispanic with light skin” and that it’s “an insult to dark-skinned Hispanics,” presumably because what’s being associated with being called a “miklo” (when used as a pejorative term) is not skin color necessarily but behavior that betrays privilege or lack of demonstration of ethnic pride. The poem makes an explicit connection to the poet’s given name: Michael, which comes from the Hebrew meaning “he who is like God.” But Michael is an Americanized name for a Chicano. It is not Miguel, its Spanish cognate. The name—Michael as opposed to Miguel—signals a series of conscious choices made by the parents: to connect the named child closer to a U.S. identity (by

selecting an English-sounding name) and farther apart from a Mexican identity (by not selecting a Spanishsounding name), to announce immigrant status, and to facilitate assimilation. The child has to deal with the consequences of these choices. All of the aforementioned reasons for “Michael” are construed as egregious acts as per the Xicano sensibility for ethnic/brown pride. But the poem troubles an easy binary by pointing out that “Michael” comes from a completely other linguistic, liturgical, and cultural context—from the Hebrew מיכאל—as the son of a God who may not even be Christian but Jewish. Nonetheless, the speaker understands that this is a weak defense for being named Miklo: because I am whiter than hispanics. The visual wordplay here (“his panics”) gestures to that anxiety of “marking” a child’s difference in a white-dominant context through the act of bestowing that child with a culturally identifiable name, though ironically, that difference is later singled out by another group in a “brown-dominant” context. Hispanic also is a term imposed by the U.S. census on the Chicano community and therefore rejected by those who name themselves Chicano.Page 48 → The critique that follows, however, questions the power that both contexts have in alienating or isolating an individual because of his difference: does that mean that a person cannot exist in simultaneous spaces? Does commitment or even participation in one signal a negation of the other? What the poem presents is a different paradigm: if Xicano is a nation within a larger nation, Miklo personifies perfectly that dual citizenship because he is a (brown) identity within a (white) body. He cannot be severed from either his whiteness or his brownness. He inhabits both spaces simultaneously. As an added footnote, despite my own familiarity with Chicano slang, I could not locate the origins (or use) of the word miklo, perhaps because it might be a regional term. The only link I found was to a Chicano film: Miklo was the name of the lead character in the film Blood In, Blood Out (1993). Based loosely on the experiences of Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, this movie follows the struggle of a young mixed-race man, Miklo Velka, as he sets out to prove his worth to his Chicano buddies by earning his “brown stripes” in very unhealthy ways: he becomes incarcerated and then helps execute a murderous plot in order to tip the scales of power and control of the prison to the Chicano gang members. One of his most notable lines in the film is, “I may be white from the outside, but I’m brown on the inside—to the bone!” Unlike Miklo Velka, Martinez’s Miklo does not set out to prove his “brown-ness,” though he does acknowledge the challenges of being light-skinned and aligning himself with a Brown Pride movement. That sentiment is reaffirmed by the speaker in “White,” whose bone-whiteness bleeds to the epidermis to a degree by which his whiteness can become objectified, compromising his subjectivity. White as a color belongs to things: “meat / within the shell,” “shell before the caw,” “bleached weed,” “egg albumen, ” “ivory of oxen hoof.” As identity marker it is but one element in the complexity of traits, components, and features. However, on a human body, it is also a “complexion of conquest,” a cross to bear: as God is a crown of thorn Page 49 →diadem of wheat so am I the echo calling fossil back to name. It’s important to interject at this moment and clarify that the aim of this poet is not to represent the speaker as

a tragic mestizo or “mixed” figure—yet another unfortunate clichГ© in ethnic literature. Rather, his is an exploration of identity through biological, etymological, and epistemological terms. And the more he breaks down the components of identity, the more inextricably bound they appear. Suddenly, this territory he’s cultivating avoids engaging some of the key words frequently invoked when discussing multifaceted identity, like borders, demarcations, transgressions, or, less popular of late, schizophrenic. There are no sides pitted against others or teams working in opposition to others, there is only one community of conversations housed within a single entity. Perhaps a more playful and daring illustration of this method of inquiry is the poem “Maria.” Wordplay is the mechanism that propels this tongue-twisting ode to the speaker’s mother, the woman whose name was unleashed from the grandmother’s throat in the opening poem. Named after the Blessed Virgin Mary, subject to “mariolatry” or excessive veneration, the mother, a venerated figure in her own right, now carries a double burden: representing both saintly chastity and maternal sanctity. Yet that virginal state is compromised with the “virgin verging in matrimony.” Nothing particularly out of the ordinary about this sequence of events except that by having the speaker entertain the notion of his own mother’s virginal state and deflowering, the speaker is sexualizing the mother figure, breaking a taboo and refuting the practice of locking the mother figure into a sacred, untouchable space. Besides, the pun is clear: “Marred Mary” (or “married Mary”) is still “Mary”—indeed, the mother’s first name doesn’t change after losing her virginity, or after marriage. She’s Mary and not-Mary, as in not a/the virgin. The identity of the mother “after erasure,” suggestively stated at the end of the poem, is both the relinquishing of her virginity and the displacement of her last name when adopting her husband’s/master’s name—it’s now her married/“mare rid” name: Page 50 →when themare he has ridden has rid the name. The poem is less about shaping a portrait of the mother, though the mother’s name becomes the impetus for investigating the cultural and religious influences on gender expectations. There is no decisive answer about whether the mother breaks away from tradition or acquiesces to the role of woman/wife/mother. The speaker simply asks, “Are you married to your name / Mother?” On one level, the question is innocent enough since the mother does marry her husband’s name. But a second way of interpreting that question has to do with being married to idealized womanhood. This denotes an interesting distance between what the speaker knows about the mother’s public life and what he doesn’t know about her private—he gives her interior life the benefit of existing outside of his personal knowledge. Therefore, the mother retains her complexity, even when her name and identity are deconstructed and dissected into simplified pieces (“the water of syllables” that expose “the rose / beneath the noun”). Indeed, there is plenty of substance beneath the surface (and artifice) of labels. Maria is all of her name and more than her name. Finally, in an attempt to gather the different threads that have been explored in the book thus far, and that will continued to be explored in the remaining pages of Heredities, a series of prose paragraphs in the form of a crown close part 1: the last line of language in each poem becomes the first line of language in the next until there’s a single circular motion that loops around ad infinitum like a MГ¶bius strip. Perhaps this is why this segment is piquantly titled “Aporia.” Aporia denotes “a philosophical puzzle or state of puzzlement,” and the seven pieces that compose the poem are subtitled with the seven “sacraments” or tenets about identity: 1. The Signified Seeks the Body 2. The Body is Not Identical to the Self 3. The Mirror Image is the Self of the Visible World 4. The World is the Gaze Between the Body and Its Listening Page 51 →5. The Signifier is Arbitrary

6. To Possess Identity, Difference Must Be Gathered 7. History Gathers in the Name We Never Are Readers are entrusted to make for themselves the connections between the statements and the accompanying paragraphs. What’s worth noting instead, for the purposes of this study, is how Martinez makes space on the page for the declarative headings to be illustrated by figurative language couched in personal narrative. For example, after the first heading: “I said, The Chicano shapes identity like an icicle fingering down from the roof’s edge.” Each tenet spills into a scene in which two people (a male and a female, it is eventually revealed, though in this world of all-inclusive dualities this could very well be the male self conversing with the female self) are dialoguing with phrases that weave the abstract with the concrete: “The name seeks to root in the arterial cavity,” “Spanish is drying blood,” “My name is the absence between body and gaze, ” to list a few. These phrases leave plenty of room for interpretation. Yet again, the structure surprises the reader by defying expectations: instead of clarity, those paragraphs that follow the headings are heavy with metaphorical language, puns, non sequiturs, and paradoxes; instead of answers, there are more questions. The uncertainty, fluidity, and even anxiety of language is unwilling to ratify the positions posed by the tenets. The aim of inquiry is not to reach conclusion but to guide a journey deeper into insight, introspection, and, in keeping with the trope of the mirror employed in “Aporia,” reflection. “The moment identity is given, the self is erased” and “The noun never sutures to the named body” are additional tenets in the dialogues of “Aporia” that create circular movements in thought and logic, each espousing a position that is subjective and arguable. Though all along the journey of the first section in Heredities the speaker was never claiming definitive authority; he was expanding the space of conversation to accommodate perspectives and experiences that contribute to the dimensionality of identity formation. These poems are not arguments, nor do they set out to negate or contradict the histories or definitions of terms. In the end, as artistic expressions, these poems Page 52 →are reimagined and reconfigured preoccupations that have been inspiring Chicano poetry since the 1970s. Martinez, however, energizes those subjects that, in a less skilled poet, would come across as nothing new. The bloodline or legacy of Chicano poetry is still present in the poems of Heredities; however, as per the extended definition of the word, “through heredity, variations exhibited by individuals can accumulate and cause some species to evolve.” In this case, cause the artistry to evolve. Works Cited “aporia.” Merriam-Webster.com. 2011. Web. March 18, 2013. Blood In, Blood Out. Dir. Taylor Hackford. Hollywood Pictures, 1993. Film. “heredity.” Merriam-Webster.com. 2011. Web. March 18, 2013. Martinez, J. Michael. Heredities: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. “variable” Merriam-Webster.com. 2011. Web. March 18, 2013.

Page 53 →

Hayden’s Mexico When my fourth decade came, I learned my name was not my name. I felt deserted. Mocked. Why had the old one lied? No matter. They were dead. —from “Names,” Robert Hayden Robert Earl Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey. He was raised, though never adopted legally, by the next-door neighbors who renamed him. Although he carried that name for decades, it wasn’t until he applied for a passport in 1953 that he discovered there was no official birth certificate on record reflecting his new name. People were contacted, affidavits were signed, and identities were confirmed before the passport was issued, before Hayden could travel to Mexico on the Ford Foundation grant he had been awarded. Hayden was forty years old when this bureaucratic snag took place, and I wondered if this startling revelation (that Robert Earl Hayden didn’t exist in the books) affected the lens he took with him to Mexico (“You don’t exist—at least / not legally, the lawyer said.”). He was already a foreigner in a foreign land, a resident of the First World visiting the Third World, and a black man in a mestizo country. How then did this additional marker of difference and state of consciousness guide his poet’s eye? His response to the question of travel, which implicitly inquired about the same curiosity I stated above, was as follows: “I suppose every poet, every artist, when he visits another country hopes to replenish his resources, hopes to find material his imagination can make use of. But if he’s too methodical, too deliberate in his quest for вЂmaterial’ he may not find anything, becausePage 54 → he can’t вЂsee for looking,’ as the old phrase goes. It seems to me you don’t choose your material anyway; as some other poet once said, it chooses you.” What material, then, chose Hayden? As a result of that journey Hayden wrote “An Inference of Mexico,” an eight-section poem that taps into a range of images that, according to the title, add up to an inferred conclusion or deduction about an entire culture. I argue that the collection of encounters that spoke to the poet was selected by what he most attuned to—a sensibility informed by the awareness of his own complexities and troubled histories: an ethnic minority and a citizen of a white-dominated nation, a black college professor in a pre–Civil Rights, 1950s American society, and a man who had been split into two names—one signaling an abandoned identity, the other an adopted identity, though this second name had just been threatened with sudden erasure. Indeed, a person cognizant of coexisting dualities, conflicting and precarious. Perhaps the most arresting of these coexisting dualities in Mexico is expressed through the celebration of the Day of the Dead, part 1 of “An Inference of Mexico.” When the “black bells of clay / serenade Mr. and Mrs. Death / exposed in wedding clothes,” the speaker is observing the notion that life and death are not mutually exclusive or demarcated states of being. Indeed, they are inextricably woven into every facet of the landscape, from the “vultures [that] encircle afternoon,” to the “almond sweetness / [brought] to the lips of children,” to the “pails of marigolds / [taken] to the returning dead.” This danse macabre gives permission to the living to be unafraid of dying, to acknowledge mortality and accept the inevitability of the most democratic stage—death—represented in the most disarming of guises: music, candy, flowers.

But not all is a performance of colorful festivities. Wedged into the poem is the voice of a pimp who has recognized the speaker as an American tourist: “Such pretty girls in JuchitГЎn, seГ±or, / and if one desires—.” At the lack of success in tempting the tourist, the pimp, wearing “a flowered shirt, androgynous,” suggests, “Such pretty girls, seГ±or, / but if instead—,” meaning, if instead you prefer pretty boys. This is a fascinating premise on par Page 55 →with the tone of the day: that heterosexual and homosexual desires thrive on the same plane. The invitation to the speaker to be a participant, or rather, a patron of sex tourism implicates that speaker as a symbol of privilege and with economic means. His currency is defined not by his race or his sexuality (neither of which are ever mentioned) but by his presumed wealth. Thus a class hierarchy breaks through a day that had been engineered to level the playing field, since rich or poor, everyone dies; but in real life, the populace continues to be identified between the haves and have-nots. A tourist, even one of modest means or one who is marginalized in his home country, has more bargaining power in a Mexican context, but that doesn’t erase the consciousness of class status or marginalization. Thus such a tourist can be both a have and a have-not. Hayden shifts into a romanticized vision of the natural landscape in part 2, “Mountains,” in which the beauty of the vista invokes a Christian godliness and a pagan/Mesoamerican godliness. It’s important to note that in Mexico the two dominant populations are mestizo (mixed race, of Spanish and indigenous ancestry) and indigenous. The Day of the Dead (November 2) is actually a pre-Columbian religious ceremony that nearly overlaps with All Soul’s Day (October 31)—a deliberate attempt by the Spanish Catholic Church to usurp the Aztec holy day. Those mountains are silent witnesses to a four-hundred-year struggle between the Old World and the New. The Old World is elegantly represented with another Spanish import (besides Catholicism), the Spanish bullfight (part 8, “La Corrida”), a veritable dance of death (“Man-in-beast, creature / whose guileless power is his doom.”), and the New World is symbolized in part 4, “Idol,” by the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, she of the serpent skirt, a deity honored in the days of human sacrifice, when the “soundless drumthrob of the heart [was] wrenched from the living breast.” Hayden is clever, however, blurring the two spiritual dimensions, or rather, having them coexist on the page in “La Corrida”: the “bullgod” (a designation that gestures toward nahualismo, the Amerindian representation of an animal self that guides the human toward enlightenment) takes on a particular Christ-like Page 56 →and martyr-like dimension: “Upon the cross of horns/ be crucified for us. // Die for us that death / may call us back to life.” Note that the “return” points both to a biblical resurrection and back to the opening of “An Inference of Mexico,” Day of the Dead. The cycle is indeed in motion. Parts 3, “Veracruz,” 6, “Market,” and 7, “The Kid,” examine contemporary Mexico’s streets. For all the modern advancements and industrialization, the embarrassing truth of poverty prevails. The speaker notes “Indian boys [as they] idle and fish” and a “shawled brown woman” protecting her eyes against the sun by turning “toward the fort, fossil of Spanish power.” At the market, “ragged boys” steal and haggle, cripples beg, appealing to those who “stride / on the hard good legs / money has made for them.” Waiters “strike and curse” at the boy “found with the homeless dogs / that worry sidewalk cafes / where gringos with dollar bills / deplore and sip.” Though Mexico’s city streets are the stomping grounds for people from all classes, the poem’s gaze on the poor population implies not surprise or shock or disdain (what the dollar-flinging gringos seem to be expressing) but rather empathy. And though one beggar appeals to the speaker as a tourist, the tourist-speaker does not want to identify with the other (perhaps apathetic) tourists. What’s interesting is that the poet should zero in on these images of the disenfranchised instead of focusing on the sites he visits; Veracruz and Cuernavaca are renowned for their colonial architectures and performing arts. It’s as if Hayden refuses to let the Spanish presence obscure the damage that came from the neglect and oppression of the indigenous populations. If the mestizo culture is a palimpsest (Spanish language and culture built atop the indigenous languages and cultures), Hayden is deliberate in not succumbing to the playbook of tourist survival: ignoring a host country’s social ills or relegating “history” to buildings and art, since the indigenous people are still very much alive (albeit dispossessed). The duality of “sol y sombra” (light and shadow) referenced in “La Corrida” keeps circling throughout the poem: life and death (“Wail of

the newborn, cry of the dying”), haves and have-nots, European and Mesoamerican, Christianity and paganism, and even the natural world pitted against the man-made—on the Mexican coast, “reality/ bedizenedPage 57 → in the warring colors / of a dream / parades through these / arcades ornate with music and / the sea.” The key to understanding Mexico as a consciousness of dualities is underscored in part 5, “Sub Specie Aeternitatis,” a Latin term that translates as “under the aspect of eternity,” meaning “in its essential or universal form or nature.” In this section the speaker steps back and takes a panoramic view of the mestizo culture, recognizing that the pre-Columbian and the colonial stories thrive side by side, separate and together. The altar “that honored once / a tippling fiercely joyous god” still stands while down below “the empty convent lifts / its cross against a dark.” The cloisters are now open to the public and the ghost of “a conquered and defiant god” still roams its “hidden passageways and rooms / of stone”—the mestizo narrative that has been etched on rock remains unassailable and permanent. Though Catholicism did displace the indigenous religions as the dominant expression of faith, the pre-Columbian civilizations continue to haunt its culture. Mexico’s past continues to exist in Mexico’s present. To revisit that title, is it really an inference about Mexico or an inference from Mexico? I argue that this is yet another duality of Hayden’s: this cluster of images paints a startling portrait of Mexican society in the 1950s, a representation not unlike the Mexican society of today. Indeed, that mestizo narrative has endured, just as Hayden observed that it had and would continue to. But this portrait can also function as a kind of mirror, an interface that reflects the self as an entity of coexisting dualities: “[the material] chooses you.” This state of recognizing the self as a component of coexisting dualities doesn’t signal or guarantee harmony, peace, or easy reconciliation; rather it offers an opportunity for introspection, for embracing complexity, and for building a platform for exploration of identity, community, and story—indeed, the strategy I used in this explication of Hayden’s poem. Hayden is not the only notable African American poet who has reached south of the border for poetic inspiration. Others include Langston Hughes, Jay Wright, and, most recently, Tracy K. Smith. Though the African presence in Mexico is widely known and well documented, with racism a problem in that country as well, there is no appeal in African American writers to compare or decry the racism of blacks in Mexico. Instead, they Page 58 →respond to a familiar structure of power: class and the disenfranchisement of the poor, the indigenous, and those denied access to education or training in any trade. This literary empathy is an acknowledgment by marginalized citizens of a country with its own troubled history of marginalized citizens of another. You exist, each artistic endeavor declares, as I exist. Works Cited Hayden, Robert. “An Inference of Mexico.” Collected Poems. Ed. Frederick Glaysher. New York: Liveright, 1984. 17–26. Hayden, Robert. “Names.” Collected Poems. Ed. Frederick Glaysher. New York: Liveright, 1984. 171.

Page 59 →

The Blatino Poetics of Aracelis Girmay The biographical paragraph in Aracelis Girmay’s books of poetry Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007)—which will be the focus of this study—and Kingdom Animalia (Boa Editions, 2011) states quite explicitly “her heritage combines Eritrean, Puerto Rican, and African American traditions.” As a declaration of ethnicity, she all but includes the word “proudly,” as in “her heritage proudly combines,”—but she doesn’t need to. That’s one of the functions of the bio, to announce one’s professional achievements, to associate one’s identity with credentials, with educational and literary institutions, with geographical locations, and with cultural contexts. These choices are optional. They can also be strategic. I would argue that in the case of Girmay, the bio also gives permission to the reader to employ a particular lens that textures the reading experience, a conjecture that’s quickly proven possible by the fourth poem in Teeth. Her bio also states that she was born in Santa Ana, California, and so she proceeds to celebrate the multicultural, multiethnic landscape of her birthplace with the poem “Santa Ana of the Grocery Carts”: Santa Ana of mothers, radiators, trains. Santa Ana of barbecues. Santa Ana of Trujillos, Sampsons, & AgustГ-ns, Zuly & Xochit with their twin lampish skins. Santa Ana of cholas, bangs, & spray. Santa Ana of AquaNet, altars, the glitter & shine of 99 cent stores, taco trocas, churches, of bells, hallelujahs & center fields, aprons, Page 60 →of winds, collard greens, & lemon cake in Mrs. Davenport’s kitchen, sweat, sweat over the stove. Santa Ana of polka-dots, chicharrones, Aztecs, African Fields’, colombianas, sun’s children, vanished children. Santa Ana of orales. Santa Ana of hairnets. Patron saint of kitchens, asphalt, banana trees, bless us if you are capable of blessing. The title itself gestures toward a symbol that connects the working class with the middle class—the grocery carts employed by both groups at the market, the public space in service to all economic households. Imagine the grocery carts rolling down the aisles that stock the shelves with products that address the demands of its customers, which supply general staples but also the culturally specific items used in the preparation of such dishes as tacos and collard greens. Imagine the customers themselves, inhabitants of the same city but members of different communities: white, Latino, African American, Latin American, Caribbean, African, Asian (the poem

mentions Cambodia and Vietnam). The diverse demographics of the eleventh-largest city in California may not be surprising, but neither should its influence be in shaping the worldview of the poet. Vallejo de Santa Ana, so named in 1769 by the famous Friar JunГ-pero Serra, site of one of the original twenty-one Spanish missions that spanned from San Diego to San Francisco, guides the speaker toward a decidedly Catholic context—an irresistible reach if Santa Ana is to symbolize a nurturing, maybe even maternal, presence, a guardian angel, a patron saint of domesticity, a motherly love. The city’s sacred roots, its contemporary multifaceted landscape (its ingredients, if you will) merge in the structuring of the poem as a list and as a litany. It is the pleas that speak to the power of the saint; it is the coexisting cultures that speak to the richness of the city. Yet the poem doesn’t end on that intriguing appeal, “bless us if you are capable of blessing.” It goes on to announce that just as it is a place of births, creations, reconfigurations, inclusions, and imaginations, it is also a place of destructions and devastations. It also a city of loss, death, and pain—damage inflicted on Page 61 →its citizens by its “one thousand mouths.” The grocery carts, with their see-though ribcages, also signify hunger and homelessness. Such is the complex relationship with one’s home, one’s first place of definition—an open-eyed perspective that resists the sentimental and the romantic but leaves room for tribute and veneration. That middle ground is the fertile soil in which Girmay cultivates her poetics of multiethnicity. I would also argue that this poem is a more fitting “ars poetica” than the opening poem in Teeth, cleverly titled “Arroz Poetica” (arroz means “rice”)—a pun that transforms the Latin phrase into a Latino one via code switching. As a statement on the process of writing poetry, “Arroz Poetica” makes a more political pronouncement since it’s a poem that’s explicitly antiwar. Though it certainly sets a tone for the journey in the entire book, “Arroz Poetica” doesn’t quite map out the multiple directions in the book like “Santa Ana of the Grocery Carts,” whose important naming of peoples and places spirals out into what Girmay claims on her dedication page: “My North, my South, my East, my West.” The most recognizable expression of multiethnicity is interlingualism—the use of two or more languages. The aforementioned code-switching pun “Arroz Poetica” is one dimension of that, though the wordplay relies more on the recognition of the literary term and less on bilingual knowledge in order to be appreciated as an interlingual pun. A more accessible example is found in the poem “Ode to a Watermelon,” in which the Spanish word for the fruit, sandГ-a, is pulled apart and reconsidered as a compound word: san (meaning saint) + dГ-a(meaning day) = san dГ-a, or dГ-a santo(which is more grammatically correct in Spanish)—saint day, a blessed day. With a nod toward Pablo Neruda’s own “Ode to a Watermelon,” the poem celebrates “summer’s holy earthly, / bandera of the ground.” But here’s where Girmay elevates the poem from wordplay into a more political plane. Not only does she use the Spanish word for flag, bandera, to allude to the three colors (red, white, and green) that the watermelon shares with the Mexican flag, she also reaches back to an earlier stanza in which a split-open watermelon is held up to the Israeli troops as an act of protest by the Palestinian citizens who are forbidden from waving the Page 62 →Palestinian flag. So instead the watermelon’s red, black, white, and green are meant to stand in for the emblem of Palestine. “Bandera of the ground”—the buried flag, the repressed flag, the symbol of nationhood—is unearthed by the code of cultural visual language and manages to wave. Though Mexico and Palestine have completely disparate historical trajectories, Girmay is cleverly alluding to Mexico’s long tradition of solidarity with anticolonial struggles as part of its foreign policy. A less politically charged and more playful example of interlingualism worth mentioning is the poem “For Estefani Lora, Third Grade, Who Made Me a Card.” In this piece, the speaker is a teacher at a school in New York City’s Washington Heights, a neighborhood with a predominantly Dominican population. Estefani gives the teacher an illustrated card with a message containing the single word “Loisfoeribari.” The poem charts the teacher’s hard-won deciphering of the message, which turns out to be a phonetic spelling of the phrase “Love is for everybody.” It’s an inspiring discovery for the teacher, who suddenly recognizes that from the little girl with a Spanish speaker’s phonetically spelled name comes this Spanish speaker’s phonetically spelled message. She was able to crack the code only after she stepped out of her single-language context and into her student’s linguistic one. The poem ends with a kind of chant, a celebration of the fourword phrase “Love is for everybody,” which eventually closes up to become a single-word phrase once

again because it’s not the number of words or their spelling that defines sentiment. (A much similar though smaller moment appears in the poem “Aunt Margaret Tree of the Blackbirds, Tree of the Oranges,” in which the speaker visits her family in Mexico. She discovers that in that other country, Margaret is known as Margarita, and that “вЂaranshee’ is the word to say вЂoranges.’”) In both cases, knowledge of interlingualism facilitates communication, it doesn’t disrupt it. But more importantly, it acknowledges that this third space in which the two languages interact creates a shared and valid speech. There is one example in Teeth worth mentioning in which the shared space is the common knowledge of, in this case, biblical text that creates a bridge between two ethnicities. Set side by side in the book, the poems “LГЎzaro, for Don Tranquilino” Page 63 →and “Lazrus & Girlie Speak of Rising a Hundred Days after Lazrus’ Death” situate the Lazarus story within Latino and African American communities, respectively. In the first poem the speaker moves through a rural landscape, appreciative of its natural beauty, spiritually attached to its peaceful silence. Whether it’s a homecoming or a first visit or the daily one, it’s not clear. What is certain is that the speaker has identified his final resting place and so he declares, “This time it’s going to take more than Jesus / to make me rise.” The phrase “this time” suggests that he has been pulled away once before. The statement is less blasphemy and more of a common sentiment in immigrants to wish to be buried in their lost Eden, their ancestral homeland, if even they don’t die there. And because Lazarus is called by his Spanish name LГЎzaro, that homeland is likely somewhere in Latin America. The poem is like another version of that well-known Chucho Monge song “MГ©xico lindo y querido.” Written in 1921, it’s become, nearly a century later, the immigrant’s anthem for its telling chorus: “MГ©xico lindo y querido / si muero lejos de ti / que digan que estoy dormido / y que me traigan aquГ-.” (Mexico, pretty and beloved / if I die away from you / let them say that I’m asleep / and let them bring me back to you.) In the second poem, Lazrus is so in love with life, with his beloved, that he resists the idea of death, which will only take him away from his pleasures. He expresses this sentiment to Girlie, his wife, who chides him, “But, husband, we can’t always be the living.” She then concludes by referencing the Second Coming of Christ and tells him that the only way they can stay together is by accepting the fact of their deaths, the period of waiting before the Resurrection. The vernacular spelling of Lazarus and the vernacular tone of the poem suggest African American speakers. The mention of fieldwork locates the couple in the South. The two pieces preceding the Lazarus poems set the stage for these assumptions. The poem “What Brang Me Here” takes place during segregation, the speaker defying Jim Crow laws by taking a drink from the “Whites only” fountain. The poem “But When They Go to Light the Fire on Me” deals with getting burned alive, likely after a lynching—a suggestion made by the poem “What Brang Me Here,” in which the speaker remembers his wife: “She don’t know I’m hanging here / like a fruit from Page 64 →a tree.” Suddenly, Girlie’s looking ahead to a better place takes on startling implications. And her statement “But, husband, we can’t always be the living” situates the lives of African Americans on a more dangerous and threatening terrain. The Latino immigrant can identify his ancestral homeland, whether or not he is able to return. Some leave for economic reasons, some flee social or political turmoil, others are exiled—but home can still be located on the map, home can become a mythic place, heaven as a place on earth. But for Girlie and Lazrus, for the speaker who has been lynched and burned alive, heaven is the promised land away from the earth: “Preacher says, Some day you have to accept your death / if you expect to raise up from this land.” My theory is that these poems have been placed side by side in the book not to compare heartaches, since there is no comparison to the treatment of African Americans in this country, past or present, but rather to gather these differing experiences within the same community and to acknowledge the disparate legacies invoked when considering such concepts as home and homeland. This becomes a particularly meaningful process for the person of multiethnic ancestry—recognizing the differing diasporic experiences as a way toward understanding the self, and the contrasting relationships and dynamics as a black body in varying cultural contexts and social situations. Hence Girmay’s preoccupation with language and how Spanish, Spanglish, code switching, and other modes of interlingualism locate the person within a Latin American immigrant trajectory. Even if the reader was told, for example, that Don Tranquilino was dark-skinned, that would not reorient his narrative to align with the African American journey. That is why the identity terms Afro-Latino and Blatino (as in Black Latino) have become

increasingly useful—as shortcuts to announce a differing diasporic experience. This is not to say that the black body in Latin America does not endure racist violence and prejudice or that an Afro-Latino/Blatino in the United States would not be vulnerable to the racism endemic to the country’s current climate, nor are labels an attempt to compartmentalize experiences. Rather, the differentiation is an attempt to engage specific historical nuances—how the slave trade brought Africans to the Americas and how the descendants of these slaves have Page 65 →had to negotiate belonging and nationhood, depending on where their cultural identity was nurtured. Decidedly, Girmay, who identifies as a black Latina, does place more energy exploring the Afro-Latino or Blatino branch of the family tree located in the Caribbean. The poem “In the Cane Fields,” for example, speaks of a love story between two slaves unfolding despite the dangers inside a sugarcane plantation most likely located in Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). “Tucutu TГЎn” pays homage to the African influence in the music and food of Puerto Rico. And the poem “Ride” takes the reader on a bus trip through Puerto Rico’s working-class neighborhood, including “Barrio Obrero of doo-rags, cornrows, / brown skin, white skin.” Since Girmay also acknowledges her Eritrean ancestry, her work examines various locations, landscapes, and histories of the African continent. Eritrea, a country on the western continent in what is called the “Horn of Africa,” whose coastline touches the Red Sea, is bordered by Sudan, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. The title poem “Teeth” is the only one specifically set in Eritrea, on the occasion of the speaker’s trip to Massawa, its most well-known seaside village, during liberation day. The driver of the vehicle is the speaker’s cousin Gideon, and coming along for the ride are two sisters. The speaker’s task is to figure out which one of the sisters is the object of Gideon’s affection. It turns out it’s the older of the two, “whose mouth looks stronger than his hands,” “whose teeth might be bullets of ivory.” The speaker ends the poem with an arresting metaphorical leap: I imagine from this mouth: kites, rain, ax equal to lace, the yellow & lick of a jar filled with the sweet of stinging bees. Those “bullets of ivory,” coupled with liberation day, gesture toward the troubled history of Eritrea, whose geographical location made it an attractive acquisition for empirical nations. Indeed, the territory has changed hands repeatedly and yet it Page 66 →has survived its subjugation under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Italy, Britain, and most recently Ethiopia. Its liberation has indeed been hard-won. But by bringing attention to the woman’s teeth, and not the man’s, even though it’s clear that Gideon too is a citizen of Eritrea, Girmay is deliberately casting light on the struggle and strength of the African woman. The wondrous images the speaker projects onto the woman’s mouth (kites, rain) are at home with the double-edged imagery that speaks of resilience and fortitude (ax equal to lace, honey “with the sweet of stinging bees”). This interpretation is underscored by the poem “Adisogdo’s Song,” in which a list or litany of forty feminine names is woven, two names at a time, into the lines of a poem that celebrates African womanhood, a key line in that poem declares, “We are strong & live like soldiers.” Another: “We sing like birds.” The woman’s mouth (or her voice) as the purveyor of story, history, memory, and testimony is an important trope in the Africa poems. It avoids turning the woman’s body into a passive metaphor for the African nations. She speaks. She speaks for herself as a woman, and as a citizen of her country. Her speech, her song, is her agency and what the man worth her affections will appreciate about her. Such is the case in the poem

“Hyena, Hyena,” for example, based on a folktale from Ghana, which tells the story of a woman who enters her hut only to discover that her husband has turned into a hyena. Instead of being a story about an encounter that causes horror or fear, the husband’s transformation becomes yet another act of love between these two people who seem perfectly matched before and after the shape-shift. “I love you your doggish tongue,” he tells her, and then later, “Your voice is from a bed of scorched grasses.” The poem ends with the hyena-husband inviting his wife to Crawl down, crawl down like this. Howl with me. We two be the stench of corporal light, yes, your tongue is reason for noise. Page 67 →Another poem also set in Ghana is “The Rain at Dzorwulu,” in which the speaker reminisces about a trip in which she has a life-changing existential encounter with the rain. As she’s reconnecting with her ancestral homeland, she surrenders to the storm as an inspired act of purification or baptism, a spiritual moment that allows her to gain perspective about her presence in Africa, the long journey of her people to the New World, and her role as a daughter of multiple ancestries: remember how you opened your mouth to it & tilted your wet head back, & showed your teeth, your tongue, & let your larynx become the ladder for that wild weather to descend into your deep black & crimson spaces, the third chamber of your lapis pump, your easts & wests & norths & souths, your million intricate rooms. And finally, in the poem “The Piano,” the large instrument, gendered as she, flies out of her prison and crashes into the street “with her hundred teeth & voices,” defiant, perhaps, “after years by a window.” The speaker, shocked at the inexplicable event, saddened by the loss, eventually manages to wrap her mind around the gravity and enormity of the silence that befalls the world when suddenly a significant someone is missing, or absent, or dead: The hole in my heart is so big, room enough for the sky to pass through, holding Jupiter’s hand, I can fill it with a mountain. I can fill it with a name.

So perfect & used-up & broken. As much as she lauds the woman’s inner beauty and importance, Girmay doesn’t overlook the African woman’s vulnerabilities or dangers in the embattled African societies. If there is a case for a title that says it all it is this one, inspired by the testimony given by a woman, fugitive of Darfur, at a refugee camp: “Sudan: Hatum Atraman Bashir, 35, Is Pregnant with the Baby of Page 68 →One of the Janjawid Raiders Who Murdered Her Husband and Gang-Raped Her. When the Janjawid Attacked Her Village, Kornei, She Fled with Her 7 Children. When She and a Few Other Mothers Crept Out to Find Food, the Janjawid Captured Them and Tied Them to the Ground Spread-Eagle, Then Gang-Raped Them. They Said, вЂYou Are Black Women, and You Are Our Slaves.’” The title’s graphic language is meant to illicit a visceral response, perhaps even move a reader to a level of awareness and political consciousness since the poem was written during a time when the atrocities at Darfur gained international attention. Though attention to the region has waned since the internal conflict between the Sudanese government forces and the indigenous population intensified in 2003, it bears noting that the nation continues to be in a state of humanitarian emergency. But it’s the woman’s story that once again appeals to Girmay, and she amplifies its visibility, its voice, as an act of sisterhood, closing the poem on a moment of resistance and perseverance: The night is black. Night in fields above the land is black. Her braids are black. Her eyes. Her body rising up in ululation— magnificent. Black. The poem “Palimpsest” immediately follows the testimony from Darfur, and its subject matter refuses to release the reader from the burden of bearing witness to yet another kind of atrocity against women. A palimpsest usually refers to a page of script that has been written over an erased or effaced earlier version, though traces of that earlier version are still visible. The palimpsest’s layers become a record of usage, reveal a history. A secondary definition is a bit more abstract and can refer to anything (not necessarily a page) that is reused or altered (not necessarily through the act of writing) but that still bears visible traces of its earlier form. One palimpsest in question is a young woman. Five soldiers have accosted a family. One puts a gun to the young woman’s head and coerces the father to rape her under the threat of killing his daughter and then sodomizing his other children: Page 69 →he, sobbing, naked, up to the sky, into her chamber smell of sweat; how he cannot stone; how no thing will gallop, how it is so quiet inside his ear the way she cries

his name The narrative of the daughter has been corrupted by the imposed narrative of a rape. The narrative of the family has been corrupted by an imposed narrative of the atrocities committed against the most vulnerable in times of war. This forced incest is an act of violence against the young woman in service to breaking the spirit of a man, her father. The father, in order to save his children, performs the unthinkable—he is given no choice, or rather, he will not choose to disobey and then watch his children tortured and murdered. As he vacates his senses, his daughter’s voice keeps him bound precariously to the last thread of his humanity—his name. The poem stops there, though it’s clear the story doesn’t end. And it doesn’t offer the reader any closure or consolation because this isn’t a poem about resolution or even healing. It is a very short poem with a very big pain suspended on the wires of its own strife and damage. It is a story about sacrifice, though even unpacking that word creates an unseemly tug-of-war: Was the daughter the sacrifice? Was the sacrifice the father’s? The story remains unresolved because the reader has not been invited to judge or second-guess the father’s decision; the reader has been asked to hear the story in order to say it happened, it exists. It is important to note that unlike the previous poem this incident is not set in any specific wartime or location, though it is embedded between two other poems set in Africa, which is the only orientation supplied to the reader—that and the gun. It is a story that could take place in any of the numerous wars in Africa but that is not specific to Africa, it is specific to war. As a reminder of this, Girmay includes a glimpse into the devastating Page 70 →period of revolution that afflicted the Central American region by including the poem “Limay, Nicaragua,” whose mountains, whose volcanoes are “jangled with bones.” And earlier still, in the opening poem, “Arroz Poetica,” which references the war in Iraq, the speaker becomes preoccupied with collecting the names of its innocent victims as a way of memorializing the dead, but also of holding global politics accountable for the deaths: they will not call your name, Hassna Ali Sabah, age 30, killed by a missile in Al-Bassra, or you, Ibrahim Al-Yussuf, or the sons of Sa’id Shahish on a farm outside of Baghdad, or Ibrahim, age 12, as if your blood were any less red, as if the skins that melted were any less skin, & the bones that broke were any less bone, as if your eradication were any less absolute, any less eradication from this earth where you were not a president or a military soldier. The sense of solidarity that Girmay has with various international ethnic groups under duress illustrates her commitment as a citizen of the world and is informed by an appreciation of her own multiethnic identity and multicultural first home—the Santa Ana of the Grocery Carts. To be clear, a person doesn’t have to be multiethnic to hold these same value and convictions, and neither does a person with a multiethnic identity have to subscribe to these politics, but it’s important to acknowledge the artist who is making evident the connections between her identity, her politics, and her poetics—the way she shapes her world on the page. The final two poems in Teeth are perhaps the most deliberate in announcing those assertions. In “Epistolary Dream Poem after Finding a Schoolbook Map,” the speaker spreads out a map on the

kitchen table. She addresses a beloved in a different time zone and begins to muse about how small that distance actually seems: “let the distance not be so not near / between us, meaning, / let it all be here, not so very far, far, far.” She then begins to chart her family ancestries to Mexico, to Puerto Rico, to African America, to Africa. “Let me tell you,” she states, each step of the journey. Another Page 71 →way of saying “Please, bear witness.” The poem goes on to repeat the names of people the reader has already met and places the reader has already visited in the previous poems in Teeth, though this poem is less summary and more of a roll call—an invocation of the dead, of family lore, of memory, an echo of an earlier poem (called “Invocation”) that welcomes all things back: come loss, come teeth, come crows & kites, conga, conga, & kettle drums, come holy, holy parade of dirt, come mis muertos who dance in procession while tubas play, come. By the middle of the “Epistolary Dream” poem, it is clear that the speaker is no longer only addressing the beloved and that her personal history has unfolded into a history of migration, of movements that reconfigured the demographics of many countries and that propelled and expanded the various diasporas. What does it mean to recognize the map as everyone’s home? It is a true statement, but an idealized one that best fits the context laid out by the title—it is only a dream. This does not denote surrender or defeat, but rather a wish, maybe even a goal achieved one interaction at time: Let me tell you these things with the map on the table so small between us. Let me hear you tell me what you are able. Let us both be able. & let us not cause damage, & let us not do harm, & let us find some ways to know each other, & let our knowing be peace. Page 72 →I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how, despite some of the more somber moments discussed so far, there are just as many celebratory notes in the book in the form of relationship poems, poems that honor the

ancestors, poems in praise of the heart, in praise of the eye, playful poems like “Ode to the Letter B,” and sprinkled throughout the book, flitting on and off the page like a bird, that word—love—how it punctuates the high-pitched admissions of affection, appreciation, respect, adoration, and gratitude: “I am thankful for the kitchen table . . . I thank God for cloves. / I am thankful for red beans & black beans & rice. / & rice. I am thankful for rice. / I am thankful for the barking of dogs.” And perhaps those positive affinities, above everything is else, are the engine behind the poetics, the reason for life—breath, the reason for breath—word, voice, and song—the poems of Aracelis Girmay, whose present journey is an extension of the many journeys of her ancestors, and the responsibility of the living is to return to the stories, recover the past, and find reason and purpose there, to weave them all together into one unassailable chorus or communal prayer. That’s the message and lesson in the second to the last poem, “Litany.” The speaker keeps repeating the phrase “let us go back” after each statement of accomplishment, as in: “when we are old & our hearts have beat with us, let / us go back”; “when we have entered, & opened / and opened our mouths, let us go back”; “when we have seen wars, let us go back”; “when the poem has been sung, / when the strings & tambourines, / when all the birds have gathered at the window, let us go, / let us go there, let us go back.” And so Girmay goes back, and so this dazzling book—a gathering of her tribes. Works Cited Girmay, Aracelis. Teeth. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2007.

Page 73 →

insert [gay black] boy The response by African American poets to an alarming increase in cases across the country of racial profiling, police brutality, self-appointed vigilantism, and other prejudicial acts that have resulted in the deaths of young black men was particularly compelling in 2014, a year that closed with the birth of two important movements that dovetailed on social media: #BlackLivesMatter and #BlackPoetsSpeakOut. One of the most visible books of poetry that examined society’s fears and anxieties about black bodies was Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press), whose haunting cover of a floating hood was meant to invoke the memory of Trayvon Martin, a young black man fatally shot by a Neighborhood Watch volunteer who was eventually acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges. Though this case took place in 2012, it became a watershed moment in awakening people’s consciousness about a divided public opinion regarding institutional racism in the justice system. And each time a new name was added to that roster of killings committed with impunity, that divide only seemed to widen. The outraged response on the streets was expressed with mass protests, marches, and “die-ins” across the country, with a spectrum of ethnic and racial groups participating in solidarity not only in the United States but around the globe. The response on the page in American presses came across as timely. Besides Rankine’s Citizen, a few other noteworthy releases in 2014 included Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press), by Saeed Jones, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press), by Jericho Brown, and [insert] boy (YesYes Books), by Danez Smith. Like Jones and Brown, Smith also identifies as a gay black man and writes about the gay black man’s experiences, and that intersection of race and sexuality is an important pronouncementPage 74 → because it leaves no room for unintentional ambiguity when considering the speaker’s gender identity as he examines the complicated dynamics of relationships between men, between lovers, between a straight man and a gay man, between a gay man and his social, sexual, and political interactions. And although in queer black subjectivity race and sexuality are inextricably bound, Smith opens [insert] boy with an exploration of the black body deemed object and—in the context of the troubled climate described in the previous paragraph—the black body deemed target, in the first section of the book, aptly titled “[black].” In the poem “Black Boy Be” a list of abstract and concrete images that he’s likened to follows, though the most damning is the line “like nothing at all, & ain’t that something?,” which speaks to the perceived lack of value placed on the life of the black body. “The Black Boy and the Bullet” addresses his vulnerabilities: “one is hard & the other tries to be / one is fast & the other is faster.” A poem that became quite popular and was shared frequently through #BlackPoetsSpeakOut is “Alternate Names for Black Boys, ” a moving list of seventeen items that includes “7. monster until proven ghost / 8. gone / 9. boy / 10. phoenix who forgets to un-ash.” And just before an untitled poem that invokes the names of Sean Bell, Bo Morrison, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Latasha Harlins—all victims of violence against black bodies—Smith includes a startling prose poem with the line “came out the womb obituary scribed on the backside of your birth certificate.” Smith makes some important statements by presenting blackness under siege at the forefront of the conversation: it is an immediate acknowledgment of the hostile social landscape that affects black people primarily; it is a recognition of blackness as the first identifiable physical characteristic of the black body, even before gender, class, or sexuality, which shapes the sometimes negative interactions with that body; and it is an affirmation of the tone that will dominate the emotional truths in the book, an admission that’s stated in the untitled poem that precedes the shift into the introduction of sexuality: “I am sorry I have no happy poems / about the ashy hallelujah of knees. Page 75 →Whenever I open my mouth, ghosts raid // my poor tongue demanding names.” That demand for names is also a declaration of purpose: to grant the black body its denied subject position, its identity, its being, and most importantly its voice though the delivery of personal testimony. In the next movement in “[black],” the poems “Faggot or When the Front Goes Up” and “Genesissy” queer the book, reconfiguring the title from [insert] boy to [black] boy to [gay] boy. Here the reader comes across “a boy made with sunflowers” and learns that “on the thirteenth day, God barely

moved, he laid around dreaming of glitter; pleased with the shine, sad so many of his children would come home covered in it.” The biblical theme carries forward into the next, untitled piece in the book, a riff on the biblical bloodlines (so-and-so begat so-and-so) with the arresting line “hate begat Leviticus,” a reference to the often-quoted scripture that has been used to justify Christianity’s vilification of homosexuals. But before closing the “[black]” section, Smith revisits the boy within a working-class context since many of the aforementioned deaths occurred in urban spaces, where racial tensions are especially heightened. In the poem “& My Mother Notices Someone Else’s Blood on My Hands,” for example, the speaker admits, I struck a light skinned boy with chamomile eyes who tried to steal my wallet out my FUBU jeans folded on the side of our crumbling court. And from the poem “A Failed Attempt at Creation”: I built a man in my image, gave him a hat, a good pair of loafers, a dime bag, everything I’ve learned about being black, holy, drunk, my mother’s son, not afraid of the gun. Page 76 →In the first poem, the marker of impoverished urban space (the “crumbling [basketball] court”) and the fight for the small private property of the wallet, which led to excessive bloodshed—visible evidence of the boy transgressing into the violent territory of men—and in the second poem, whose “dime bag” and “gun” reveal the boy transgressing into the adult underworld of drugs, betray a compromised or curtailed childhood. These portraits speak to the desperation of inner-city life, not as explanations or excuses but as sometimes inescapable landscapes. But the poems also gesture toward the uncomfortable reality that youth in urban settings are perceived to be older than they really are, despite the kind of behavior they engage in. From the black boy, a black man, which only intensifies the perceived threat of his mere presence. His mistakes, his bad decisions, are met with the kind of hostile reception that is usually reserved for adults who “act like children.” Yet black children are not given the benefit of empathy for their lack of maturity or juvenile behavior, nor are they seen as independent of the economic ills and criminal records of their communities, hence the grown-up confrontations (with police officers, with self-appointed vigilantes) that result in young people’s deaths. Smith is not concerned, however, with preaching about racial injustice or critiquing police brutality; he is more invested in presenting the full range of complex experiences for black youth, avoiding the simplistic dichotomies of innocence or guilt, good or bad—which is how the black youth narrative ends up being presented by the media and assessed by the authorities and the law. It’s imperative at this point to unpack further the word boy and its linguistic resonances. In its racial context it gestures to its use as an infantilizing address, from white man to black man, that expresses both condescension and derision. In gay parlance it is a designation given to a younger man, typically a youth, but in relationship dynamics

a “boy” is the willing object of desire of an older male, sometimes referred to as “daddy.” Therein the intriguing tension in the word, which Smith eventually explores more fully in the later poems of the book. But until then he allows for a provocative dance between definitions and contexts in “[black].” The six poems that compose the second section of the book, Page 77 →“[papa’s lil’],” deal with the speaker’s complicated relationship with his terminally ill and emotionally broken grandfather. Though the focus is the elderly figure, these poems do set up the introspective element that is the movement of the third section, “[ruined].” Dispersed throughout this section are five prose poems, all titled “Healing: Attempt, ” sequentially numbered, that engage the conflict-ridden nature of adolescence: sexual desire and frustration, heartbreak and passion, though the passion is limned with a level of desperation and even violence since the religious tropes that appear in the poems suggest clandestine love and lust—homosexual feelings in conflict with the community’s faith. “Healing: Attempt #2,” for example, ends with the following arresting language: “yeah, maybe I should give my throat over to prayer and offer it up as a sacrifice or something, maybe they will all want me to say ahhhhh or amen, who knows. most gods are just another man who demands my knees & I know where that commandment leads.” And “Untitled and About Sadness,” the poem that immediately follows, underscores the inner turmoil and sense of alienation from community with the stanza define worry.his mother his friends. his God. the woman on the bus who mourned at the sight of him. The most provocative of the six sections in [insert] boy is without question “[rent].” It’s not a matter of the explicit homosexual content but rather the contexts of the relationships therein. In earlier poems Smith presents a glimpse into the devastating settings of inner-city life and the temptations made available for desperate and misguided black youth: theft, drugs, and violence. For the gay black boy, navigating the street life is also dangerous, and little solace is afforded by the disapproval of his sexuality at home and at church. Without a public space to express this part of his identity, the gay black boy must resort to the secretive world of gay encounters, usually made available through the Internet. The opening poem in the section is appropriately titled “The Business of Shadows,” but it’s the second poem that comes out Page 78 →kicking with its own edgy header, “10 Rentboy Commandments or Then the White Guy Calls You a Nigger.” The gay black boy understands the erotic value of his blackness and the sexual prowess that is attached to black men by the white gay community—even a cursory glance at gay porn on the Internet affirms the exoticization and commodification of the black male body. The speaker uses this knowledge for financial gain, at the expense of compromising his dignity and surrendering to the twisted fantasies of his older, white, gay clients: “you know / he thinks of you as a lion or AIDS / or anything scary & African.” And later, “he still called you a nigger, / but so what? You still gonna get paid.” Although there is a moment of pause for the speaker (“is it worth it to stop this history / if you ain’t gonna eat?”), the task at hand—pleasing his customer—eventually takes over. Because the rent boy doesn’t even have to be gay to service gay men, this profession is hardly an outlet for sexuality. But for this gay black boy it is an option for making a quick, though not necessarily easy, buck, and it becomes simply another desperate avenue available for a black boy in need. But Smith certainly gestures toward a critique of the gay white desires that create a demand for black rent boys in the poem “Mail.” “Mail” is an epistolary poem of nine notes composed by a young black man and addressed to the wife, Mrs. Thompson, of his white client. The notes detail a series of admissions that begin with the apology “Sorry if you ever taste salt when you kiss your husband good morning.” The speaker identifies himself as a rent boy by revealing that he gets compensated for his services: “Your husband pays me fifty extra dollars when I bust on his face” and “I fuck your husband twice a week. / He pays me.” The young man’s vulgar language is meant to keep him from creating a bond with his client—it’s strictly business—but the frequency of his

visits to the client’s house, the speaker’s familiarity with its contents, his admiration for the “lovely” pictures of Mrs. Thompson betray an awareness of his participation in the married man’s adultery, enough to be judgmental about the man’s closetedness. The speaker’s sympathy for the wife and the startling declaration “I feel we are family now” suggest that he identifies with her as just another secondary player in the narrative that the white man controls. This man has effectively constructedPage 79 → a long-standing double-life afforded him by the privileges of his “straight” male identity and the resources of his class. What facilitates the transactions and exchanges between middle- and upper-class men and poor black youth? The Internet with its same-sex dating sites, but particularly Craigslist, a resource for classified ads that has, quite within the realm of its initial purpose, also become a venue for those seeking out or offering anonymous and casual encounters. The poem “Craigslist Hook-Ups” paints a picture of a hungry landscape inhabited by those looking for sexual release, guilt-ridden by the artifice of intimacy, availing themselves of the desires of others in order to feel wanted or visible—in short, the Internet offers temporary solutions to feelings of isolation, abandonment, and invisibility. Perhaps through the Internet is how the speaker of “Obey” found his way to an orgy, he a “black rampage that come to conquer a house full of men who could be mall Santas or Senators, except for the brown ones who speak no English except yes & no & harder.” Here too the white men are in control of their own sexual fantasies, in which the bodies of color are mere tools present to function loyally as sex toys. But in this poem there is a power shift that comes from the speaker’s recognition of his role in the sex games. He is referred to as “dawg” and is commanded to mount the brown man like a dog, and when he complies he unleashes all of his frustrations in a frenzy of violent sex, leaving the man bloodied yet satisfied. And so “one by one [the others] bend, one by one I wreck them. everything must leave here limping & bruised. everyone must know what I know.” What he knows is the Hegelian paradigm he has surrendered to in order to feel a sense of power in the master’s house. Within the context of the orgy, the white men’s submission to the speaker is all play-acting, but outside the house, his very presence is a true threat. It’s interesting that Smith includes a wink to the reader with the poem “I’ll Spare You Another Poem about My Mouth,” since the mouth has been a frequent trope in the collection as a vehicle for voice, expression, nourishment, intimacy, and sexual prowess. And though that poem appears in “[rent],” the next mouth image comes up in the opening of the fifth section, “[lover].” The opening poems in this section are mostly wistful Page 80 →and wispy—whispered love poems with softer images such as “I lost myself in the eyes of a brown boy who looked at me like I was tea his aunt poured over ice & lemon for him.” The shift to still waters is temporary, however, although it does underscore a more pronounced maturity in the speaker’s articulation of his troubled relationships. In the poem “Dancing (In Bed) with White Men (with Dreads),” the speaker addresses the poet Audre Lorde, whose self-empowerment teachings he has learned but feels he has compromised: “Lorde, forgive me / for not grabbing the shears that night // I let him stay in my bed after he said race wasn’t real.” And in “Cue the Gangsta Rap When My Knees Bend,” the speaker is being ironic in his own fetishizing of the “thug” image, fulfilling his own sexual fantasy: “The only word my mouth cares for is O.” Smith’s playfulness is on full display in “[lover],” perhaps the section that best flexes his poetic skills, and always winking at the reader with his verse that aims for sophistication of image and naughtiness. In “Poem Where I Be a House, Hence, You Live in Me,” the speaker declares, “I play a gazelle with a mouth bursting with knives / which means I am a house that swallows / anything that dares to blood & rise.” The gravitas of “Raw,” a poem about the risk of unprotected sex between men, does manage to resist the trademark Danez Smith tickle, but it comes back full force in “I Cast Out My Tongue Like a Key”: what is semen but condensed cloud the body’s recipe for lightning?

what is an ass but a canyon daring the tongue to jump? Yet Smith punctuates this section by ending with another love poetry sequence, “Poems in Which One Black Man Holds Another,” which also recognizes carnal pleasure and desire but concludes with a very different, more complacent, tone: “I am learning to dance with my clothes on / to make fire in the absence of a storm // it’s how we don’t have sex / & never will, how the joy / is love enough.” At this point the narrative arc of the book is much clearer: it moves the black body from object Page 81 →of anxiety, to object of desire, to self-awareness, to agency. The speakers are no less vulnerable to the uncontrollable and unpredictable elements that surround them, but they are much more in control of their own imaginations. Although an early poem in the book apologizes for not having any happy poems, the final section of [insert] boy, titled “[again],” proposes to close the book on a more uplifting note. The first of the three poems, “Song of the Wreckage,” contains an epigraph in which James Baldwin expresses his frustration for the slow-moving pace of social justice and equal rights for black people. The speaker of the poem picks up on that tone: How many black boys stolen in the hot night? From their own homes? From their own bodies? How many black boys until we make history finally let us in on the joke? How little progress before it’s not progress? How much prayer & song must we stuff our mouths with before we lose our taste for empty? This lengthy poem, positioned right after Baldwin’s quote, is also meant to be received as an impassioned plea—one that’s fueled by a love for community, although it does acknowledge the moments of doubt that change will come without compromise or concession. The dominant sentence is the rhetorical question (“When revolution is ready to come, who will have the time? / Are you sick of the word black?”), and with no less than thirty-one question marks in the sequence the speaker is generating introspection and thought. It might be too much of a romantic notion to argue that the speaker is deliberating this address, speech-like, to the black community, which is why I will posit instead that the speaker is uplifting himself. He, the vulnerable black boy, the gay boy, is finally wrapping his mind around the experiences that he has lived, witnessed, read, or heard about—all of those tragic narratives that were meant to create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy are, at the moment, suspended and inert, since this gay black boy is alive and bearing the responsibility of witnessing on behalf of the dead: Page 82 →Pray them suddenly 60, for so many black boys betrayed by age never get to feel the settling of joints, the experience of bones. Let them cypher until their song is the new sun, give them a joint & let them build a world from smoke. Let them build a black boy’s world. Rhythm to replace time, water free of the blood’s salt, peaches where there was once fire,

watch the boy gods care for the dark child they raised from nothingness, how it started black & ends black. The sentiments in “Song of the Wreckage” are reaffirmed in “King the Color of Space, Tower of Molasses & Marrow,” which is a celebration of the collective black body shaped by the former poem: “I want to kiss you. Not on your mouth, but on your most / secret scars, your ashy black & journeyed knees, // your ring finger, the trigger finger, those hands / the world fears so much.” And closing the collection is “On Grace,” which recalls the athletic and powerful body of Usain Bolt, the record-breaking Jamaican sprinter. Bolt becomes a symbol of beauty, strength, and accomplishment, though not completely divorced from the danger that hovers over all black bodies: “Do you know what it means to be that beautiful & still hunted / and still alive? ” Indeed, the stories of perseverance and survival are just as necessary as those that pay tribute to the ones who did not live to tell their own story. In the end, that’s the honest message in the playful title [insert] boy—as in reinsert, reintroduce, bring back, resurrect, revive. Or most urgently, keep alive. Works Cited Smith, Danez. [insert] boy. Portland, OR: YesYes Books, 2014.

Page 83 →

Queer Immigrant World, Queer Immigrant Word At the time of this writing, all I have in my hands are the manuscript versions of two books slated for publication in 2016. The first is by the Indo-Caribbean poet Rajiv Mohabir, whose first book, The Taxidermist’s Cut, won the 2014 Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry, judged by Brenda Shaughnessy. Mohabir was born in 1981 in London to Indo-Guyanese parents who, eighteen months after his birth, migrated to the United States. Two places the family called home, and which made an indelible impression on the young boy, were the Guyanese neighborhood of Richmond Hill in Queens and the mostly white community of Chuluota in central Florida. After earning an undergraduate degree at the University of Florida, Mohabir returned to New York City to earn a teaching degree from Long Island University–Brooklyn and an MFA from Queens College. The second manuscript is by Vietnamese American poet Ocean Vuong, whose first book, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, was picked by editor Michael Wiegers for publication with Copper Canyon Press. Vuong was born Vinh Quoc Vuong in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam. The Vuong family, refugees of the Vietnam War, eventually settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where the young boy was renamed Ocean by his mother after his parents divorced. He left Connecticut to pursue an education in New York City, earning a BFA from Brooklyn College and an MFA from NYU. At one time, both poets were living in Queens, which I currently call home. (Mohabir has since relocated to Hawaii to pursue a PhD.) They both identify as gay (both also proud Kundiman fellows). And in the small literary circles of New York City, Page 84 →it was inevitable that we cross paths repeatedly—either I was part of their audience, or they were part of mine. They expressed their admiration for my work, and I in turn became a fan of theirs because of its literary merit, and because I related to their immigrant upbringing and to their journeys as artists. I couldn’t resist, after hearing of the happy coincidence that their books would be out the same year, reaching out to them for permission for an early glimpse of their works, which resulted in the following essay about how queer immigrant experiences shape poetic vision. In the preface to The Taxidermist’s Cut, Mohabir writes, “I have always / made myself invisible. I mean to say / I am still—this trembling breath of a comma, / this coincidental object of your want.” The lines gesture to a number of themes that structure the dynamics of the book: the tension between rejection and desire, between pursuit and persecution, between speech and silence, between passion and fear. All of these binaries are cross-stitched in the bodies of the poems that follow, like in “Ortolan,” which opens with the line “Take the bird alive and blind it.” It’s an intriguing surprise because it’s not its song that will be suppressed but its sight: “It’s important that no light gets in // and that the bunting cannot see its body.” The body becomes associated with shame, with a narrative that necessitates seclusion, or invisibility. The bird is twice a captive—to its current prison, in this case a windowless room, and to the shame-filled story. But its imprisonment is more like an act of mercy—the bird catcher saving the bird from itself. And the story of the bird is not told through song, though it’s revealed through its beak: when the speaker invites the bird catcher to “bite down” on “the entire life / in the dark,” he will “taste every man // who has ever put me in his mouth.” The transformation of the bird catcher from warden to lover and the speaker’s shape shift into the body of the bird uncover the nature of the relationship: the speaker’s submission to a clandestine (or closeted) sexual exchange as a way to be, in the safety of darkness, his true self. That homosexuality becomes repressed by familial or societal values depends so much on the identity of the gay person and the type of community that person lives in. For the speaker in Page 85 →“Ortolan,” the first hint of an ethnic identity is in the lines “veil your face / with my mother’s silk sari. // Hide your gluttony.” Two other bird poems in a later section reach back to the fear of rejection. In “Carolina Wren” the young speaker discovers a nest on his mother’s porch and, inquisitive about the hatchlings, reads up on that nature of birds: “wrens reject their young if a boy should touch, // or be touched by another boy.” But this knowledge comes too late—the boy has touched the hatchling already and the wren abandons

it. Identifying with the bird, the speaker ponders, “How will this child survive being cast out / or abandoned for what he cannot change?” And in the poem “Passerina ciris,” (the scientific name for the painted bunting), the speaker closes his consideration of the bird, the origin of its name, and its association with the Greek mythological story of Scylla, “who betrayed her father / for her lover’s sake,” with a startling plea of his own: Dear Father, forgive me for what your body made me, for what I perverted, being a man and taking another. When he lays bare-chested in my nest of down and vesper tine, which betrayal can a son endure: a father’s beating with wings, or his own body? The speaker’s erotic desires are an affront to the parents’ expectations of their son. He’s able to hide his sexual identity from them, though at the cost of being in a state of constant anxiety and consternation. That interior struggle becomes compounded with another dimension of his identity—his ethnicity. In the title poem, “The Taxidermist’s Cut,” Mohabir examines the intersection of race and sexuality as the immigrant family becomes subjected to suspicion and the speaker to closer scrutiny after they relocate: “there is no hiding brown skin and burnt cumin in Chuluota, where active members of the Klan rally against sand niggers and faggots.” Feeling isolated from his family because Page 86 →he’s gay and feeling culturally dislocated in the white community, the speaker is now “outside of brown and unbrown.” “The Taxidermist’s Cut” traces the speaker’s struggles—and failures—to fit in, from taking a Christian name, to engaging in anonymous sex with the same type of white man who vilifies him, to resorting to self-scarring or cutting as a symbolic skinning and evisceration: “Take off your skin right hereВ .В .В . Pull out your entrails and stuff your yellow belly with coals.” Every attempt is sabotaged by the reality of his dark skin and his inability to hide his sexuality from a community that is more attuned to recognizing it since they are actively seeking it out in order to persecute it. “You are being stalked,” the speaker tells himself. The speaker finally breaks though by “dressing for the field,” a claiming of the strength of the animal he’s frequently compared to—coyote/wolf—because of his physical features (his big eyes, his white teeth, his hairy skin): “Cover your own skin with the hide that does not hide. Place your arms and legs in the empty pelt and sew yourself up.” Though there is that moment of spiritual triumph, that is not the end of the speaker’s persecution. In the poem “Econlockhatchee,” a bully throws the speaker against the school lockers, demanding, “Brown fairy bitch, go / back to where you came from.” In the poem “West Indian Manatee” the speaker is so selfconscious about bathing in the Homosassa River that he’s certain “drab river fish gossip about [his] brown skin.” And on his way home, he knows “police will stop you, check your head for rags.” The poem “Canis latrans” (the scientific name for coyote) spells out his various burdens even more explicitly: You cannot change your hide— your parents are not from India and only curse in Bhojpuri.

Other Indians don’t know your drawl, and laugh at your rustic coat. You split from them for Skeldon and Lusigan. Here, everyone calls your camouflage a different name— Page 87 →some jackal, brush wolf, some shudra, or sand nigger. The xenophobia and homophobia may be insufferable for the young immigrant, but he does eventually make an exit when he relocates to a larger city where he can realize his sexuality now that he’s removed from his two oppressive contexts: his family and his community. This is not an unusual transition for some gay children of immigrants—the pursuit of an education (a family value), which allows the young person to leave home, also becomes a pursuit of the freedom to be himself. Male privilege plays an important role in the immigrant family’s acceptance of the young man’s journey, which, unbeknownst to them, is also a kind of flight. The section “[Last Night] in Jackson Heights [This Morning] with Him, Not You,” is composed of seven love poems. The expressions of love, heartache, and life have a remarkably different tone than the earlier poems about sex and desire, like the aforementioned “Ortolan” and also “Tripline,” in which the search for love becomes likened to a hunt that’s more like a seduction or an entrapment than a courtship: “The trick is to gather enough bedclothes / to predict a lover’s comings and goings // with fair precision. In the dark, string a thread / across the trail that leads from the bed to the road.” In the Jackson Heights love poems, there’s no reaching for the darkness as a cloak or disguise from the same-sex attraction and affection. At one point the speaker even declares, “What is there to fear—.” Safe from prying eyes, from knowing glances, the speaker is even able to connect with another gay man of Indian descent: Cast as a map, in the Nastaliq of his curling black hair, a curving qawwali across his Punjabi-American chest. The eroticization of the words Nastaliq (one of the main calligraphic hands used in writing the Perso-Arabic script) and qawwali (a form of Sufi devotional music popular in South Asia) is Page 88 →an extraordinary leap from the speaker’s previous situation in which his Indian identity was the cause of his angst and abuse. Those markers of difference, the connections to his own Indian ancestry, are now associated with pleasure, desire, and even beauty—a permission granted to him when he’s able to locate pride and appreciation in his cultural surroundings and relationships. Though this shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted as advocacy for the decision to leave home, it must be acknowledged that for the gay son of immigrants, even home can be an unfulfilling place—he must define his nurturing space on his own terms, he must take control of his own experience, he must find his “joy of now.” Mohabir’s frequent titling of his poems with scientific names speaks to the notion of multiple epithets, or to getting underneath the surface of the familiar exterior. Besides birds, he also engages sea life and four-legged mammals, the trifecta of creatures representing the three major elements: air, water, and earth. The fourth element,

fire, is passion—love and desire, which eventually consume or overpower everything else. The reference to taxidermy in the title The Taxidermist’s Cut addresses the emotional wounding, the self-mutilation, and the preservation of the hunter’s trophy for display—the hunter usually being the victimizer, the sexual predator, the racist and homophobe. But Mohabir is also playing with the narrative invoked by the etymology of the word taxidermy—it comes from the Greek meaning “arrangement of skin.” Only when the speaker becomes comfortable with his skin—his ethnic and sexual identities—can he achieve agency and grace. As a narrative about the gay immigrant experience, Mohabir’s journey is shaped by the family’s economic necessities—employment guides the family to its next home and every other factor becomes secondary or even irrelevant in making such decisions. And an Indo-Guyanese family arriving at a predominantly white Christian setting results in cultural displacement; their foreigner status makes assimilation impossible. The young man’s sexuality makes him an outsider among outsiders. And yet the gay youth breaks through the two layers of casings, of prisons, to claim his voice. If anything, this triumph, which is not easy but is possible, is the most important lesson in The Taxidermist’s Cut. Page 89 →Offering a slightly different perspective on the gay immigrant experience, Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds situates the speaker as a refugee from Vietnam. The family’s loss of its homeland is the first and most painful fracture that eventually leads to an even more damaging break—the departure of the father. The conflict (the Vietnam War) that instigated the separation from the country and the absence of the father is a major presence in the book, hovering over the speaker like a harpy. I use that reference deliberately because Vuong engages Greek mythology in a number of poems to draw parallels between Troy and Saigon, between Odysseus and the speaker’s father. In “Telemachus,” for example, the speaker likens himself to the loyal son of Odysseus, waiting patiently for his father’s return. Telemachus’s name means “far from battle” in Greek, and so too is the speaker sheltered from the father’s war, though he’s aware of what it means to come upon the ravaged body on the beach: “Do you know who I am, ba?” the speaker asks, though the father is too fatigued to answer. The son cradles the father gently, almost like a lover, and projects a homoerotic sentiment upon this encounter since this lesson in tenderness is what the son will take with him to all future moments of same-sex affection: “[My father’s] face / not mine—but one I will wear // to kiss all my lovers goodnight: / the way I seal my father’s lips // with my own & begin / the faithful work of drowning.” And in “Aubade with Burning City” Vuong considers April 29, 1975, the fateful day that initiated Operation Frequent Wind, in which American civilians and Vietnamese refugees were evacuated by helicopter during the fall of Saigon. Although it’s called an “aubade” the poem reads more like a dramatic opera that ends with the ascension of the chopper (a veritable deus ex machina), its passengers observing the vanishing city, the square below, where “a nun, on fire, / runs silently towards her god— / Open, he says. / She opens.” And finally, the journey of the Vietnamese “boat people” is addressed in the poem “Gently & Far Away.” The “boat people” phenomenon took place particularly in 1978 and 1979 but continued steadily through the early 1990s, with approximately two million Vietnamese refugees relocating to other South Asian countries and eventually to more developed countries, like the Page 90 →United States, after the numbers created a humanitarian crisis. The poem (whose alternate title is “My Ulysses”) is composed of seven prose paragraphs told through the voice of a pregnant woman. As she is cradled in the boat, so too she cradles a fetus in her belly, her husband nearby. The couple has fled while “the city was still smoldering,” and they bide their time dreaming of a positive outcome to their sacrifice, placing all hope of a future on the birth of their child. “If we make it to shore,” the father says, “I will name our son after this water.” That is, Ocean. Though it’s worth clarifying that Vuong (born in Saigon) employs plenty of poetic license in shaping a mythology from the immigrant journeys. What matters is that these are the stories of Vietnamese refugees, not necessarily his family’s accurate narrative. Unlike Mohabir’s speaker, whose sexuality is fraught with stigma and persecution in a homophobic

environment, Vuong’s gay speaker is aware of the objection to homosexuality, though it doesn’t quite become an anxiety in his private life. The poem “Revelation” begins with the acknowledgement of transgression (“Because we were boys / I could only touch you in the dark / where we pretended the sins / promised by our father’s / would not find us.”) yet it eventually becomes a love poem couched in comfort and pleasure, much like Mohabir’s “Jackson Heights” series: “As I tasted myself between / your teeth, the fire crackling like rain / on dead leaves, someone, / somewhere, was beginning / to sing.” This doesn’t mean, however, that Vuong doesn’t recognize the troubling dangers that can befall a gay man. Tragedy is explored in the poem “Into the Breach,” which invokes Jeffrey Dahmer, the man who cannibalized his same-sex lovers/captives (“I just don’t know how / to love a man / gently.”), and in the poem “Seventh Circle of Earth,” which is inspired by the murder of an elderly gay couple in Texas. The poem is a sonnet composed of a single word (“faggots”) repeated over and over in each line, with seven footnotes inserted sporadically that allow the voice of one of the victims to speak. One startling moment comes from the knowledge that the man and his partner were immolated after getting stabbed and bludgeoned to death, which brings even more gravity to the speaker’s words when he says (addressing his partner): “All your laughter ashed / to air Page 91 →to honey to baby / to sweetheart, / look. Look how happy we are / to be nothing / & still // American.” The use of the word American becomes the moment of critique—that in the land of the free and the brave, such cowardice, such atrocity committed against two people for their perceived vulnerabilities (their ages, their sexualities) is possible. But in general, the speaker’s negotiation of his homosexuality is very private, complicated but not necessarily a personal crisis. The bittersweet verse in “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” speaks to that: Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest. The poem moves through nine additional sections in which the speaker’s sexuality is shaped by the keen awareness that the body takes its trauma to its love making, like when the father, after backhanding the mother, then hides himself in the bathroom to masturbate: “And so I learned,” says the speaker, “that a man, in climax, was the closest thing to surrender.” Sex is the honest expression of ecstasy (“My thrashing beneath you / like a sparrow stunned / with falling.”), but also humanity. Though Vuong’s poetry shapes the primary speaker’s sexual and ethnic identities, it’s the familial identity—the speaker as son—that fuels the journey in Night Sky with Exit Wounds. In the poem “A Little Closer to the Edge” the speaker imagines his conception in a bomb crater—an unusual bed that foreshadows the marital strife to come. “Headfirst” echoes that besieged atmosphere with the mother advising her son, “When they ask you / where you’re from, / tell them your name / was fleshed from the toothless mouth of a war-woman.” The mother, though an important part of the speaker’s connection to memory, makes less frequent appearances than the father, who’s the speaker’s connection to sexual energy, male activity, and other forms of masculine agency, even though early in the collection, it’s suggestedPage 92 → that the father is absent. The opening poem, “Telemachus,” for example, previously discussed, imagines the father’s homecoming. In “My Father Writes from Prison” the father sends word from Hanoi, and only through his distance and dire situation is he able to admit to vulnerability (“there are things / I can only say in the dark”) yet he still manages to invoke his sexual prowess (“I push my face / against a window the size of your palm where / beyond the shore / a grey dawn lifts like the hem / of your violet dress / & I ignite”). In the poem “Prayer for the Newly Damned” it’s the son who seeks redemption from the Father/God. The

boy feels conflicted over eroticizing a moment of violence—a loss of innocence (“Dearest Father, what becomes of the boy / no longer a boy?”) that brings him closer to his father’s troubled landscape. The father’s volatility and his violence toward his wife are honestly rendered in the poem “Time Maker, ” but this poem is immediately followed by “Deto(nation),” in which the speaker feels the stress of his affection for his father, despite his wrongdoings. But, in an inspired act of grace, it’s the father who gives the speaker freedom from whatever hold the father has over his son: Don’t stay here, he said, my boy broken by the names of flowers. Don’t cry anymore. So I ran. I ran into the night. The night: my shadow growing toward my father. That bittersweet bond is again addressed in the poem “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” in which the speaker declares, “Don’t worry. Your father is only your father / until one of you forgets.” Although forgetting is not likely for a speaker who carries the weight of memory so heavily on his shoulders. The best he can hope for is to make peace with the pain through a kind of forgiveness. How appropriate, then, that Night Sky with Exit Wounds closes with the poem “Devotions,” in which the speaker says, “BecausePage 93 → / the difference between prayer / & mercy—is how you move / the tongue,” meaning how language navigates memory: by asking/seeking redemption, or offering/finding it. After a hard-won struggle, the more enlightened choice is made. If the transformative act for Mohabir’s gay immigrant speaker is his freedom to be himself, for Vuong’s gay immigrant speaker it is to forgive himself—to release that survivor’s guilt that burdened him in two ways: as a witness to the family’s domestic abuse and as a witness to the adverse effects of the refugees’ displacement. Mohabir and Vuong write about divergent experiences in terms of navigating sexual and ethnic identity: Mohabir’s gay immigrant narrative is framed by the xenophobia and homophobia mostly outside the home; Vuong’s gay immigrant narrative is shaped by the frictions within the home. Yet both narratives pronounce their empowerment when the speakers confront their fathers—symbols of masculinity and nationality. In Mohabir’s poem “Pap” the speaker tells the father, “If my story angers you / I am not sorry.” And then later in the poem he asks, “Will you burn my poems?” as in will the father reject or dismiss the gay son’s story? Even after a thrashing with the riding crop, the speaker manages to locate “the crumble of song” in his hands, presumably to continue to speak and write. In Vuong’s poem “To My Father / To My Unborn Son,” the title is a recognition of the threatened bloodline, a concern for any patriarchal community, certainly a preoccupation for the father when the son is gay. The speaker explains to the father, “Know that I never chose / which way the seasons turned. That it was always October / in my throat.” And whether or not there will be a son to continue the family line and story, the story of the family through the gay immigrant son’s perspective will have been told, committed to print: “Because what you heard, or will hear, is true: I wrote / a better world onto the page // & watched the fire take it back. // Something is always burning.” Notice that Vuong too employs the trope of fire to signify an attempt at purification or censure, which only results in a short-lived silence since the son, while yet alive, still has a voice and the ability to bear witness to his personal journey on the page. The gay immigrant writer has the power of language to describe, define, and reconfigure his Page 94 →world—a world that is broken but not uninhabitable, because the damage is a part of that narrative: “Turn back & find the book / I left us,” Vuong’s speaker suggests, “Use it to prove how the stars / were always what we believed // they were: the exit-wounds of every misfired word.” Works Cited

Mohabir, Rajiv. The Taxidermist’s Cut. New York: Four Way Books, 2016. Vuong, Ocean. Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2016.

Page 95 →

Mexica Warrior The Amerindian Vision of Natalie Diaz Since Sherman Alexie, of Spokane/Coeur d’Alene ancestry, no other Native American poet has been as popular as Natalie Diaz. Since Sherwin Bitsui, of DinГ© (Navajo) ancestry, no other Native American poet has been as critically acclaimed. And no other female Native American poet has skyrocketed into the spotlight as swiftly as Natalie Diaz, of Mojave and Spanish ancestry. The publication of When My Brother Was an Aztec by Copper Canyon Press in 2012 launched one of the most impressive writing careers from any community, earning Diaz a number of prestigious awards and national recognitions within years of its release. The uniqueness of her cultural and professional background is often singled out in journalistic profiles—she is a former college and pro basketball player who, after graduation, found her calling as a director of a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her home reservation—but her poetry usually situates the first-person female speaker as a witness or chronicler of the dramatic events that afflict her family and community. Indeed, the project of When My Brother Was an Aztec is to root the troubled landscape of Native American family life within a mestizo context in order for the speaker to stand right beside the scenes on the reservation and attain perspective through an additional cultural lens. The title poem, which also opens the collection, invokes what will become the sustained trope of the book—Aztec/Mexica mythology, culture, and imagery as conduit toward world building. In the poem, the errant brother has experienced a spiritual death (which will be explained further in the book). At this juncture what is offered is the effect, not the cause: a likely drug addiction (he fed on “crushed diamonds and fire”) while Page 96 →he wasted away in the basement of the family home and “sacrificed” the parents every morning. The path between the main floor of the house and the basement is referred to as “la Avenida de los Muertos, ” or MictlГЎn, which is the passageway to the underworld. But this dead man climbs up every so often, thinking himself “Huitzilopochtli, a god, half-man, half-hummingbird,” to gorge on his parents, “draining color until their eyebrows whitened.” The warrior tribe of Mexico is a perfect parallel for this household’s violence and abuse; the unruly son, “like all bad kings,” indulges in the power of his masculinity, entitlement, and ravaging nature—he consumes everything around him like a conflagration. The parents, conflicted, “crossed fingers // so he wouldn’t come back, lit novena candles / so he would.” At the conclusion of the poem, the parents (hacked to pieces) are left searching for their fingers in order “to pray, to climb out of whatever dark belly my brother, the Aztec, / their son, had fed them to.” The hacking is both metaphorical and a reference to the Aztec ceremony of human sacrifice, though contrary to the Aztec belief that the souls of those who were sacrificed were also saved, the parents are actually closer to a kind of damnation, which gestures toward a Catholic-based belief—what the Spanish colonizers imposed upon the indigenous people. That sentiment is underscored in the poem “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Reservation,” which declares,: “everyone knows angels are white.” It’s worth noting that for Diaz, the reach for Aztec culture is not only a conceit but an apt genealogical affinity. As the child of an indigenous woman and a Spaniard, she is in fact a true mestiza—the first Mexicans were borne out of the collision between the Aztecs (and other indigenous tribes) and the Spanish after HernГЎn Cortes landed in the Americas in 1518. Diaz, however, isn’t presenting her paternal ancestry as a colonizing agent, rather she’s taking into consideration the layers of history of the land and her bloodline: the reservation, located in the Southwest, is also the United States, was also Mexico; she is Native American, and white, and Mexican. It is pointless to extricate one identity from another, so instead of isolating the reservation or herself, she expands the landscape of identity Page 97 →and imagination by engaging Mexicanness, which is a mestizo culture—a mix of everything. The influence of Catholicism is apparent in a number of the titles: “The Gospel of Guy No-Horse,” “Tortilla Smoke: A Genesis,” and “Reservation Mary,” but in each of these, Catholicism is more a cultural presence than a religious practice. In the third poem, for example, Mary goes from being a talented

basketball player to succumbing to the ills of reservation life—teen pregnancy, poverty, despair. Now, at seventeen, she “sells famous frybread and breakfast burritos / at tribal entities on pay day—tortillas round and chewy as Communion / wafers embracing commod cheese and government potatoes.” The role she plays as a nurturer is bittersweet given her wasted potential as an athlete. In fact, when asked if she still wished she could play ball, she “goes for a beer run instead.” The use of Catholicism is a strategy for irony. Unlike the biblical Mary, Reservation Mary’s son’s birth is neither miraculous nor momentous—he will not save anyone, especially not his mother. And though she appears to be revered for her culinary gifts, she is no icon, she is a clichГ©, the latest in a long line of Reservations Marys—women who reenact a familiar reservation narrative. The narrative, not the name, becomes the birthright of the young woman. And to further prod at the failure of the religious teachings to affect the people of the reservation in more positive ways, Diaz includes the tongue-in-cheek poem “If Eve Side-Steeler & Mary Busted-Chest Ruled the World,” which includes the following irreverent stanza: What if Mary was an Indian & when Gabriel visited her wigwam she was away at a monthly WIC clinic receiving eggs, boxed cheese & peanut butter instead of Jesus? Again, the critique here is that the government programs are more useful than the mythologies of Catholicism. The names Eve and Mary carry with them the cultural contexts but are dispossessed of their sanctified power. On the reservation, which is rich with tradition and memory, Catholicism is an invasive introductionPage 98 → that has been absorbed into the culture, though it’s not considered as threatening as another invader: diabetes. Diseases such as alcoholism, drug addiction, and diabetes are known plagues on the country’s Native American reservations, and one explanation is the cultural displacement of the indigenous tribes—their relocation and isolation from their native landscapes, the subsequent dependence on government assistance, and the introduction of nontraditional diets. These are the early lessons for a young girl on the reservation. In “A Woman with No Legs,” the speaker is given a dire warning by her grandmother: “to keep my eyes open for the white man named Diabetes who is out there somewhere carrying her legs in red biohazard bags under his arms.” And in “The Last Mojave Indian Barbie,” “Mojave Barbie couldn’t find a single soft spot on her body to inject insulin.” Yet these harsh realities are not enough to explain the embattled brother whose addiction has discombobulated the family dynamic. In “How to Go to Dinner with Your Brother on Drugs,” the brother comes “dressed for a Day of the Dead parade—three-piece skeleton suit and cummerbund of ribs,” while the father sits in the living room in the dark, “wearing his luchador mask—he is El Santo. / His face is pale. His face is bonewhite. His eyes / are hollow tear drops.” By invoking these images prevalent in Mexican culture, Diaz is announcing that a different context is needed to navigate this familiar scene, suggesting that the cause, too, is different or a new manifestation of a familiar invasive component. And yet, by the second section of When My Brother was an Aztec, she still doesn’t reveal the cause of the brother’s mental breakdown. Instead, she continues to detail the inescapable cycle in “Downhill Triolets.” When the brother is incarcerated again, high on meth, the phone rings at 2:00 a.m. and “dad, our Sisyphus, pushes his old blue heart to the station.” The father is a particularly tragic figure who seems to lack the strength that the mother exemplifies in the earlier poems in the book. In “Hand-Me-Down Halloween” the mother defends the daughter from a bully and then proceeds to confront the bully’s mother, gaining the bully’s candy in the process. And in “Why Page 99 →I Hate Raisins” she gives a reality check to the daughter, who is distraught that she takes her government raisins as a school lunch instead of a sandwich, like the other kids. The mother chides her: “You mean the

white kids. / You want to be a white kid? Well, too bad ’cause you’re my kid.” This assertive personality fades out as the brother takes over the family narrative; in fact, by the middle of the book the mother “is gone somewhere.” But the father is quite visible though silent and defeated. In the poem “Formication” the speaker says solemnly, “my dad quit speaking long ago. He only sings these days, / not with words, rather with small strikes and sparks.” And in “Black Magic Brother”: My brother. Our perpetual encore— he riddles my father with red silk scarves before sawing him in half with a steak knife. Now we have two fathers, one who weeps anytime he hears the word Presto! The other who drags his feet down the hall at night. Neither has the stomach for steak anymore. By the end of section2 the speaker herself begins to feel the adverse effects of the brother’s trauma. In “A Brother Named Gethsemane” she assesses the grim reality of the household: “This is no garden. This is my brother and I need a shovel to love him.” Gethsemane, according to scripture, is the place where Jesus prayed and his disciples slept before the crucifixion. In this case, a reckoning is upon the family, which is addressed in “No More Cake.” The poem opens with the line “When my brother died,” though by the end he shows up to the party, saying he is still alive. Indeed, this is no garden—no Eden, no Gethsemane, neither can accommodate the simultaneous places of existence like the landscape of the Day of the Dead, in which the living and the dead interact. The dead do not resurrect or come back to life, they return as the dead to move among the living. In section 3 a new diction is added to the speaker’s vocabulary that begins to clue the reader in about the brother’s situation. In the poem “Toward the Amaranth Gates of War and Love” the speaker asserts, Page 100 →All I know of war is win. What is a wall if not a thing to be pressed against? What is a bedroom if not an epicenter of pillage? And what can I do with a hundred houses but abandon them as spent shells of desire? At this point the female speaker also reveals her sexual appetite and romantic inclinations, particularly with the poems “I Watch Her Eat an Apple,” “Monday Aubade,” and “I Lean Out the Window and She Nods Off in Bed, the Needle Gently Rocking on the Bedside Table,” in which the speaker, post-lovemaking, reflects, “She has always been more orchard than loved, / I, more bite than mouth,” as the spoon (the second evidence of drug use, after the needle) gets lost among the sheets. It appears that the speaker, once a passive observer, has matured enough to seek out sex and recreational drugs. Refreshingly, that the speaker is a young woman who cohabits with other women is a nonissue—there are no “coming-out” poems or poems about the family dramas that unfold when a child’s homosexuality comes to light. Yet despite her more active role in the book, the family narrative continues to be dominated by the brother’s illness. Diaz does, however, acknowledge the defiant nature of lesbian relationships within a Catholic context by including a poem about Lot’s wife titled “Of Course She Looked Back,” which lists the many reasons Lot’s wife, as a woman, as a human, would have cause to disobey the directive from God. It’s a clever thumbing of the nose

at conservative religious doctrine. It’s important to mention that sex is not only an act of escape for Diaz’s speaker, though it is also no accident that most of the same-sex scenarios take place in the intimate spaces of bedrooms, as in the poem “When the Beloved Asks, вЂWhat Would You Do If You Woke Up and I Was a Shark?’” The speaker has carved out a space of her own, outside of the family’s line of sight—not to conceal but to be able to explore her identity and experience her body’s urges in private, unencumbered by the family’s daily and very public plight. In the personal space of the bed, the speaker achieves the freedom to imagine and to simply be who she is. Indeed, she too goes through the natural cycle of breakups and heartaches, though on the reservation even this Page 101 →appears to be more burdensome than in other settings. The poem “The Beauty of a Busted Fruit” invokes the many wounds that people have to carry with them into adulthood, when even more wounds are endured. The speaker does some wishful thinking for her beloved (notice the allusion to an earlier poem, suggesting it’s the same romantic pairing): Maybe you have grown out of yours— maybe you no longer haul those wounds with you onto every bus, through the side streets of a new town, maybe you have never set them rocking in lamplight on a nightstand beside a stranger’s bed. Near the end of the book, the poem “The Elephants” finally reveals another key component of the brother’s journey: “My brother still hears the tanks / when he is angry—they rumble like a herd of hot green elephants over the plowed streets inside him.” Discharged from the military, he returns to the reservation emotionally damaged: “He doesn’t sit in chairs anymore and is always on his feet, / hovering by the window, peeking out the door, Because, / he explains, everyone is the enemy, even you, even me.” The PTSD he suffers, his act of inhabiting the two planes of existence—life and death—simultaneously is explained simply with the line “He was home. He was gone.” Though there is no definite evidence that this is the same brother as the one who has been struggling with drug addiction, there is no definite evidence that it isn’t. What matters is that this new information gives larger context to the brother’s self-destructive behavior and that the title poem, “When My Brother Was an Aztec,” now connects the brother more explicitly to the warrior tribe—this is more than a metaphor, this has become alarmingly literal, as shown by the poem “Why I Don’t Mention Flowers When Conversations with My Brother Reach Uncomfortable Silences.” Here the speaker reports, “my brother shot many men, / blew skulls from brown skins, / dyed white desert sand crimson.” When the speaker asks innocently if there were any flowers there, the brother relates the horrific story of a stoning, likely an honor killing, of a woman wrapped in a sheet: “Blood burst through the sheet / like a patch of violets, / a hundred roses in bloom.” The graphic nature of Page 102 →the brother’s immediate past experiences, the gravity of PTSD, might just explain why Diaz resists naming the brother’s affliction until the end—it is simply too raw and too real, so that a large scaffolding had to be constructed first, sturdy enough to hold that part of the brother’s story. It’s worth mentioning that no book of note since Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, first published in 1977, has engaged the issue of PTSD for a Native American soldier. In Ceremony the protagonist is Tayo, who is also a half white, half Native American, and he has come back from his tour in World War II sickened by what he has experienced. The difference between the texts is that Silko’s story is about spiritual healing and Diaz’s story is about spiritual damage, more in tune with the well-known Sherman Alexie poem “Pachyderm,” in which Sheldon mourns the loss of his twin brother, Pete, who is killed in Iraq by an improvised explosive device. Sheldon struggled to find the proper way to express his grief until he picked up a trumpet and “blew an endless, harrowing note” like a pachyderm (he refers to God as a “poacher”) at the elephant graveyard. (Note too the connection with Diaz’s poem “The Elephants.”) The current

sensibility is to visit the character in medias res—there is no neat resolution to the conflict, no answer to the problem, only a representation of the journey thus far. The use of metaphor and allegory (the elephants, the Aztecs) simply helps create the portraiture of grief, loss, death, or any other dark element that is too all-consuming to confront directly. Additionally, these tropes eschew cultural clichГ©s by engaging unexpected spaces that are actually frames of reference for the Native American writer, which dismisses the notion that reservations are insular and detached from global activity. Indeed, even the wars in the Middle East are affecting Native American quality of life, precisely because they are now part of the Native American psyche. The pushback against the pain, then, is the strong medicine of storytelling, the placing of the trauma in the finite container of the page. Perhaps this is why Diaz closes When My Brother Was an Aztec with the allegorical poem “A Wild Life Zoo.” A tragedy has befallen a careless patron at the zoo who tempted fate by banging a stick against the lion’s cage. While all the other humans recoil in horror, beginning to sense the dangers of all the other caged Page 103 →animals, a SWAT team of workers comes to put the lion down with a bevy of tranquilizer guns. The speaker, having remained open-eyed throughout the entire ordeal, understands the folly of all the humans involved, so she demonstrates her allegiance to the lion—who was only reacting to its natural instincts after having been disturbed so rudely—by ringing her bowl against the cage. As an allegory for the journey of the book, the final act of ringing that bowl against the cage is the act of storytelling, of bearing witness, of sifting through the rubble and piecing together a narrative in which everyone is complicit. It is also an act of recovery—of the truth, of the wronged and the misunderstood, of the kindred spirit. Works Cited Alexie, Sherman. “Pachyderm.” The Awl. Web. May 3, 2012. Diaz, Natalie. When My Brother Was an Aztec. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2012. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.

Page 104 → Page 105 →

Critical Reviews I’d like to clarify that I’m more of a reader and book critic than a scholar and many of the pieces in this book are close readings that open up a few doors into the worlds of the poets I admire. There is so little criticism of poetry, particularly criticism of books by poets of color, that I couldn’t resist the plunge into this field that I did not study formally, but which is a conversation that I have learned to articulate after many years as a book reviewer, reader, and evaluator on numerous award panels and juries. My expectation is that readers will seek these titles out and engage with them differently than I have, and I will take deep comfort in knowing that I participated somehow in connecting new readers to these important and sometimes unheralded writers. When someone presents their imagination on the page, the most disrespectful response is silence. I’m grateful to be doing my part to keep them relevant by simply writing about them. In this section I include reviews I wrote as a contributing editor for the L.A. Review of Books, an online publication that welcomed me after I left the El Paso Times of Texas, where I wrote a monthly column exclusively about Latino books for ten years (2002–12)—after a decade of writing five-hundred-word reviews I wanted to challenge myself with longer reviews and more variety. I selected 12 reviews from the 206 that I submitted during my tenure with the newspaper. I will argue that these twelve titles are still as important today as they were when I first read them. Indeed, they have stayed with me all this time, even after a number of these authors have gone on to write more books. I did not select reviews of titles I discuss in the “Critical Essays” section, such as Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral and Teeth by Aracelis Girmay. My only disappointment after I left the El Paso Times was that Page 106 →no other Latino writer took the opportunity to replace me. A few attempts were made but none of the would-be columnists achieved my level of production or discipline. This many years later, I’m still waiting for someone else to make such a commitment in service to our Latino writing community.

Page 107 →

Publishers on a Mission Three Excellent Debut Poets The poetry contest continues to be one of the few opportunities for early-career poets to publish their first books. This avenue doesn’t come without serious challenges to young writers, like the suspicion that such contests are money-making schemes, or, even more egregious, fixed. Plus there’s the issue of the cost of contest fees, which can become an unwelcome expense to young writers. There have also been some disappointing developments, like when the contest judge deems no manuscript worthy of publication, most notably W. S. Merwin judging the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1997 and Clarence Major judging the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2007. And then there is the question of the lack of diversity, aesthetic, ethnic, and otherwise, that may discourage some poets from submitting their manuscripts for consideration. Nonetheless, the poetry contest keeps flourishing, especially with those contests that seek to remedy the lack-of-diversity issue. Two of the three prizewinning first books featured here are the result of contests that are relatively new. All three prize series are designed to identify what Carolina Wren Press states most specifically in its mission statement: “quality writing, especially by writers historically neglected by mainstream publishing.” And so Laurie Ann Guerrero’s A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), Matthew Olzmann’s Mezzanines (Alice James Books, 2013), and L. Lamar Wilson’s Sacrilegion (Carolina Wren Press, 2013) take their first steps onto the literary landscape, anointed as award-winning titles and as antidotes to the underrepresentation of minority poets. Page 108 →The AndrГ©s Montoya Poetry Prize, steered by Letras Latinas, an initiative of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, states in its mission statement that it “supports the work of emerging Latino/a poets.” This biannual award, now initiating its fifth cycle, asks a notable Latino poet to select an emerging Latino poet and not to privilege any particular style, subject matter, or aesthetic. Recognizing diversity within its ethnic literary landscape, the mission statement further asserts, “While not losing sight of the traditions and conditions that gave rise to that literary expression, the Prize has as its goal to nurture the various paths that Latino poetry is taking in the 21st Century.” One of those paths, trod by Laurie Ann Guerrero’s A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, is the reconfiguring of the mother image, and by extension, the female body. “Birth Day,” the closing poem, offers the following lines, which help summarize the hard-edged sentiment of her book: “our mother-bodies protect themselves: / minerals and poems and love: stone.” Though the poem speaks specifically to the case of a woman who was “pregnant” for fifty-nine years with a “child-tumor,” it becomes an apt conclusion to a series of startling portraits about the plights of womanhood, particularly mothering. To challenge the maternal archetype, Guerrero introduces the reader to Valerie Lopez, the young mother who stashed away the bodies of her toddlers until their decomposition led to their discovery (“Babies under the House”), and Otty Sanchez, who killed and cannibalized her three-week-old baby (“Stones”). Though society and the media make aberrations of these women, Guerrero resists the urge to push back; instead, she removes these stories from their hair-raising headlines and presents them as episodes in an ancient narrative that continues to cycle through history—the tale of La Llorona. In Mexican lore, La Llorona’s origins are traced back to the arrival of HernГЎn CortГ©s, whose relationship with Malinalli or La Malinche resulted in the birth of the first mestizos. Over the centuries, La Malinche’s role as a cohort and interpreter for the Spanish conquistadors has led to her depiction either as a traitor to the Aztecs or as a woman driven by intelligence and a will to survive. Guerrero is more intrigued by La Malinche’s transformationPage 109 → into La Llorona when, in some legends, she murders her children rather than giving them up to her lover. As a figure who instills fear in errant children, La Llorona looms heavily in the dark corners of A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, as a reminder of the female’s creative and destructive powers. When the young girls in “Esperanza Tells Her Friends the Story of La Llorona” can’t reconcile the many versions of the tale, they simply conclude, “Maybe she cloned herself and there’re lots of Lloronas. Maybe someone you know, Patty. Maybe your mother.” The unsettling

proposition echoes loudly two pages later when the poem “Stray Cat” describes the nurturing acts of a feline with her litter of two. After grooming them, another instinct kicks in: “She ate one. / Then, she ate the other.” Though there are instances in which the mother figure is complying with her nurturer/protector role, these moments are still tinged with imagery that is very Plath-like in its grave shifts. In the poem “Turnips,” the speaker recounts her surprise at how fast the vegetables sprout: “They grew quick. Overnight. I swear their limey-green arms welcomed us home from school the very next day. Then mama cut them, souped them. And we ate.” And in the poem “When I Made Eggs This Morning,” the speaker/mother feeds her children, triggering the memory of a murder-suicide committed by a man who crowed “like a mad man”: “We ate. / I thought of you, / Roosterman: / the squawking birdmother / you shot by frying pan.” Safety is precarious. The domestic space, particularly the kitchen, as a location (or site) of potential danger manifests itself through nightmares (“a steak knife fiddled against the sinew of my gut”), through the depiction of kitchen items as omens (like the little Mexican pot with a “wide, red mouth that doesn’t shut completely”), or through dark humor, such as in the poem “The Alchemy of Mothering,” which spins an arresting and unrelenting allegory: The pot boils gunmetal blue. I hang my babies like shanks of meat, smallest to largest. My butcherwhite apron smeared with child mucus. A swab of sugar under the tongue Page 110 →keeps their small bodies from coiling like earthworms. The toes go first. All of these poems seem to gesture back to an earlier poem in the book, in which Plath is invoked via an epigraph. Titled “A Meal for the Tribe,” the poem asserts the mother as the only provider of nourishment, a role that is comforting but also threatening since she can just as easily withhold that nourishment: “There is no eating without feeding, my mother / always said. The hunger is numbing.” Interspersed in the collection is a nine-section series titled “One Man’s Name: Colonization of the Poetic, ” which envisions La Malinche reclaiming her voice and agency in the legacy of the mestizo people, or, more accurately, of a matrilineal consciousness: “Fight is the birthright of my daughters, too.” A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying is populated by these daughters, women who defy and trouble long-held assumptions about, and expectations of, motherhood and maternal behavior: here, mothers take lovers, make war, cause damage—“make carnage of [their] own mouth[s].” And they also write daring poems that break with polite and romanticized representations of femininity, situating the woman as the source of her own volition, a daunting force to be reckoned with. Kundiman, an Asian American poetry organization founded a decade ago, established in 2009 a poetry prize committed to “publishing exceptional work by Asian American poets.” Unlike many of the aforementioned book awards, there is no sole judge; rather, the award is “judged by consensus of the members of Kundiman’s Artistic Staff and the Alice James Books Editorial Board.” This year the committee released the winner of its 2011 poetry contest, Matthew Olzmann’s Mezzanines. Mezzanines takes its title from the name, in architecture, given to the intermediate level between two main levels

of a building. Not considered an actual floor, it is not counted among the building’s overall floors. As a metaphor for being multiracial, inhabiting the space between two cultures, languages, and homelands, the word only comes up once, in the poem “The Page 111 →Melting Pot in Housewares Has a Slight Crack”: “I’m one-half somethingВ .В .В . One part mestizo. One part mezzanine.” But so is his brother, whose features are dramatically different. The household, then, becomes likened to a department store, in which visitors insist on identifying components as demarcated categories, challenging the family unit’s melting pot: Here. In the theater of household appliances, people see my brother and I and ask which one is not like the others? Which floor is Electronics? Which floor is Hardware? Olzmann doesn’t make mixed-race identity politics the center of this collection, though he does engage the subject in at least two other pieces. In “Spock as a Metaphor for the Construction of Race in My Childhood, ” the speaker reveals that his father is German, his mother Filipino, yet he felt “like all the other kids” until his best friend declared that he was not, which made the speaker feel suddenly “half-alien.” And in the poem “Years Later, I Introduce My Brother to Person X, and Am Asked If I Was Adopted,” Olzmann returns to the topic of contrasting features in children of the same multiracial couple, what the speaker refers to as “the mysteries of DNA, a country / whose citizens are always confused.” The speaker further asserts, I too am a country whose citizens contradict each other. I’m a hybrid of competing designs. I’ve got questions that blur like metal on an autobahn and others that drift like pieces of an archipelago. These three notable moments serve to situate Olzmann within one of the many conversations that shape Asian American letters—the struggle of identity formation for a person of mixed ancestry. But the topic is by now familiar territory, which is why Olzmann is astute in not explicitly referencing it in other poems.Page 112 → And the few times he does write about it, he does so with the inventive treatment discussed above. The title’s trope, the mezzanine, also applies to the rest of the work in the book, a distinctive feature of Olzmann’s poetry—the leaps in scale and scope. The clearest example of these leaps appears in “Notes Regarding Happiness,” in which the speaker apologizes for inadvertently posting multiple messages on a Facebook page. But the sentiment in that apology quickly radiates outward, reaching across the globe and into outer space: .В .В . I’m bad at computers the way continents are bad at crossing oceans to touch the other continents, or the way planets

are bad at breaking their orbits and setting off on their own. The speaker’s breathless and exhaustive examination of a simple technical error allows him to cover plenty of ground in the poem, from sharks to funerals to hate speech, and to make one more riff and leap with things that fail (computers, engines, God) before he logs off. But the “mezzanine” in question is the level that sits between the terrestrial and the celestial, between the experience of the ordinary and the possibility of transcendence—an impulse fueled by the speaker’s imagination. A cursory look at the titles gives an early indication of this direction: “NASA Video Transmission Picked Up by Baby Monitor,” “Hello Earth,” “While Scratching My Wife’s Back, I Calculate the Distance between Sky and Earth,” “The Size of the Earth and That Which It Contains.” Olzmann connects the “small” earthly tangibles to the grand elements as a way to articulate perspective, insight, and sometimes epiphany. In the poem “93,000,000 Miles from the Sun,” for example, the speaker discusses the chances of survival after a heart attack for each minute CPR is not administered: “Light passes from the center of the solar system / to your garden and if your heart isn’t beating in that time, / you’ve got less than a twenty percent chance of feeling the sun / against your face again.” Though this is a poem about the serious subject of mortality, the inclusion of the solar system, a force that’s just as awesome and as mysterious as death, Page 113 →announces that there’s always a bigger picture—a larger room—in which to consider meaning and significance. In another example, the poem “Gas Station on Second Street, Detroit” details the encounter between the speaker and a religious zealot who startles him at the pump. As the speaker inches away from the man’s frightening doomsday rantings, he considers the following: And a hundred feet above, a horned owl flies south. To the owl, your circling looks like beginning of a fight, or two small figures about to dance the way people have always danced when the world grows dark and they think they understand. There’s something inherently spiritual about Olzmann’s “mezzanines” and in his effort to create a space that thrives as a bridge between the earthly and heavenly. It’s a place of reflection and contemplation, a temporary reprieve from the world’s chaos and a reach for a vision of paradise. The list on the Carolina Wren Poetry Series demonstrates a clear commitment to this mission, selecting works by poets from diverse communities, including women, ethnic minority, and LGBT authors. L. Lamar Wilson’s Sacrilegion is shaped by a black gay identity. Its literary ancestors are the courageous and groundbreaking writings of such poets as Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, Assotto Saint, Craig Harris, Marlon Riggs, Donald Woods, and others who gave visibility to the black male body and language to same-sex desire during a critical period in American history when such a commitment was a particularly political act. That the effort continues in 2013 speaks to the importance of this lineage in keeping open a viable avenue for expression. Though times change, there’s still an artistic impulse to give meaning to the black gay experience. Wilson’s contribution begins with poems that cover a part of the journey when every gay man becomes aware of his difference and its dangers: school bullying because he plays games for girls in “Woe unto Sons,” the unsettling recognition of the self in the body of another gay relative in “Family Reunion, 1993,” the Page 114 →innocent homoerotic fantasies that become not so inconsequential in the era of AIDS in “It Could

Happen to Anyone: A Letter to the Boy.” But it’s with the poem “Resurrection Sunday” that Wilson’s voice and skill reach an extraordinary pitch. “Resurrection Sunday” weaves two visual encounters that shape the speaker’s understanding of himself as a black gay body: one is a homoerotic film in which a white director is instructing a black male to perform auto-fellatio; the other is a photograph in the book The Anatomy of a Lynching, in which victim Claude Neal (accused of raping and killing a white woman in 1934) is shown hanging from a noose, his murder made more vulgar because first he’s castrated as part of the public spectacle. In both images, “A man holds his penis in his mouth.” The poem navigates between the two obscenities—one a sexual exploitation, the other a desecration, both acts of racism. In that journey back and forth, the speaker must locate himself as an object of desire, informed by his Otherness, and claim the subjectivity of his black male identity, which is eroticized and feared by the white gaze. In other words, he must mature into a sexual being aware of the temptation and threat of his masculinity: .В .В . I am not that boy anymore. I am not afraid to say I am a man, searching for a man whose flesh will rise, only for me, without force, without fear. Come, lie with me & be redeemed. See my yoke, this flesh, broken for you? Find here a different kind of holy, a sacrilegion, a sacrament for our santifunked souls. Dark & darker.Still. As a stunning turning point, “Resurrection Sunday” sets a tone that endures through the end of the book, even as Wilson shifts directions occasionally into the portraits and praises Page 115 →of the lives of women such as Henrietta Lacks, Lucille Clifton, and the important women in his life—his mother, grandmother MaMary, and MaMary’s sister, Tudda. The mother becomes particularly essential to the speaker’s identity formation. Refreshingly, the story of the relationship highlights acceptance and support, which makes the mother’s cancer all the more tragic: “You didn’t turn me away when I said His name is Johnnie / & I love him, & you never said Brown boys can’t be sissies, baby, / though I wish you had, since now a lump the size of the head / of a tack may take away the only one who hasn’t recoiled / at what comes naturally to me.” Wilson claims an important political? social? responsibility and does it well—to write about the black gay male experience conscious of his time: he notes gay marriage (“where I’m from, / I couldn’t marry who I want anyway”), gays in the military in the poem “Dear Uncle Sam” (“He’s not your type. / He kisses men with eyes / open, talks with them / shaded and averted to acquiescent asses.”), and the slowly changing social attitudes reflected in the family, as in the poem “Dreamboys,” in which the speaker observes his brother, “the man who was the boy who made Faggot! / a reason not to flinch,” sit through his son’s campy imitation of the catty scenes in the movie Dreamgirls: “he offers me / the only penance he can: a sheepish grin.” There’s also an interesting response in “Ars Poetica: Nov. 7, 2008” to President Obama’s commentary on his identity, “mutts like me”:

I am the what-are-you. I am the brown, the red, the white, the sometimes blue. I got some Indian in my blood. I got some cracker, too. Where I’m from, a cracker is a badge men wear like nigga in some ’hoods. I am neither & both simultaneously. While Wilson comes back to underscore the significance of his multilayered ancestry in the book’s coda (“beware the mutts / you find there. We can pack a mean bite.”), it’s actually the poem “Ratiocination” that brings the book’s sensibilities to a satisfying close. As a love poem, it echoes the empowering act of declaringPage 116 → such intimacy and affection—brother loving brother—expressed in such classic texts as In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology: You are soil, like me. Roiled & sullen, like me. Together, we cannot bear fruit. O lover, in this full moon light, teach me how to hide inside the embrace of three-quarter you, half-you, quarteryou, full of me. All three first books resonate with the phrasing in Letras Latinas’ mission statement: “While not losing sight of the traditions and conditions that gave rise to that literary expression, the Prize has as its goal to nurture the various paths that Latino [and Asian American and African American and LGBT] poetry is taking in the 21st Century.” Each book stands on its individual strengths and merits, but each is also sustained by connections to the other titles in the series, a lineage that gives readers context, perspective, and orientation. Carolina Wren Press’s stress of the word quality, Letras Latinas’ affirmation that it will “nurture the various paths” of Latino poetry, and Kundiman’s selection by committee are efforts to secure the best work from specific communities, that is, to make sure that the smaller competition pool and precisely defined guidelines attract manuscripts of literary merit. The future success of these processes, however, will become evident in the critical reception of their award-winning books. The reputation of the poetry series is shaped by its selections, either by a single breakout volume or by its history of titles. The series discussed here are quite young compared to some of the most prestigious publication awards (the Yale Series, the Cave Canem Prize, and the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, to name a few), but if the spring 2013 publication list is any indication of their progress, all three series are moving in the right direction. Page 117 → Works Cited

Guerrero, Laurie Ann. A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Olzmann, Matthew. Mezzanines. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2013. Wilson, L. Lamar. Sacrilegion. Durham, NC: Carolina Wren Press, 2013.

Page 118 →

Powerful Debuts byThree African American Poets By now it’s an industry certainty that Cave Canem, the nation’s leading literary organization whose primary mission is to nurture emerging African American poets, will have a number of its fellows publish books of poetry within the same year. This speaks to the seventeen-year-old organization’s long-standing ability to identify and mentor promising writers, and their eventual successes only add to Cave Canem’s renown. The year 2013 was no exception, and given the distinguished lineage of poets who entered the profession with a close association with Cave Canem—Natasha Trethewey, Major Jackson, and Tracy K. Smith, among others—we can assume a select few of these first-time publications might mark the beginning of illustrious careers. Cave Canem’s lengthy list of recognizable names and prize-winning titles speaks to its sustained high standard of literary merit, and to the valuable service it provides to the readership at large. As its poetry community grows, so too does our understanding of the range, reach, and yes diversity of contemporary African American literature. To illustrate this point, I’ve selected three debut collections by three Cave Canem fellows—Hum (Alice James Books) by Jamaal May, She Has a Name (Four Way Books) by Kamilah Aisha Moon, and King Me (Copper Canyon Press) by Roger Reeves—not to arrive at a consensus about what African American poetry is but to examine how three poets assert their individual voices at the same time that they become part of the illustrious community shaping contemporary American poetry. In Jamaal May’s Hum, its onomatopoetic title refers to the humming of motors (usually in cars) and to the humming of humans.Page 119 → These parallel frequencies (or movements) of sound intersect in a young man growing up in Detroit. As he perceives the particulars of urban life and landscape, he begins to see himself manifested in the city’s physicality. Notice the place, notice his body: Look for me in scattered windshield beneath an overpass, on the sculpture of a man with metal skin grafts, in patterns of mud-dragged wood, feathers circling leaves in rainwater—look. Even the blade of a knife holds my quickly fading likeness while I run out of ways to say I am here. Juxtaposing the city and the body—metal and glass mixing with flesh—brings forth unsettling imagery that gestures toward the vulnerability that both entities share. More to the point, it makes Detroit as mortal and susceptible to pain or damage as its inhabitants: Here on the shoulder of a freeway, rebar exposed by a semi that crushed a concrete dividing wall to avoid crushing a hatchback protrudes from slabs in a way she imagines bone can.

And later: “Detroit // is a stretch of highway littered / with windshield, // a boy picking remains / of a window from his hair.” These are more than moments of personification; they are also the speaker’s identification with the Motor City long after its era of prosperity, during the age of its decline. It’s fitting then that in the poem “On Metal” a mystery malfunction (the right side of a car doesn’t respond) mirrors the speaker’s own health issues: “my left ear’s limited frequency rangeВ .В .В . the left eye I’m now told is blind.” But where there’s deterioration, there’s also perseverance, or even persistence: a humming is continually heard on the pages of this book. Interspersed throughout are hums, or songs, to a series of concrete objects (hammer, stone, bolt) that create a Page 120 →solid exterior for a second, more abstract and softer hum—a series of poems about phobias, such as the fear of snow, the fear of the sea, and the fear of waiting. Sound (like heartbeat, like breath), or even noise, is the immediate proof of the body yet functioning, still alive: I need more rattle from the cabinet, more whir from the fan spinning in the laptop warming my twin sister’s lap— and when that’s not enough, I might take off my shirt and press my shoulders against a refrigerator— one of those beige monsters from the 80s you can really feel working for its hum. Interestingly enough, only a few of May’s poems touch on the subject of racial identity, most notably “The Sky, Now Black with Birds,” which invokes the horrific murder in 1998 of James Byrd at the hands of white supremacists. Identity in Hum is primarily located within the compromised yet still standing urban infrastructure (“I ask the steel sculpture / ascending from the depths / of museum grass if I am / contextualized by its immensity.”), in which desire and anxiety hum side by side. Because he’s exploring city space, it’s unavoidable that May address street violence, but he eschews the familiar narratives, favoring instead, as has been his strategy throughout, the lyrical use of metaphor and synecdoche: Yesterday your son pressed his nose to the screen door to watch a gaggle of baseball caps crowds the sidewalk. The bones did what bones do. Streetlights buzzed with their particular sadness. In a way, Hum is a bittersweet love song to Detroit. As the young speaker grows fortified, finding agency and voice within the great city, he also comes to realize the city’s weakening magnitude: There are days

I mourn being built Page 121 →from this. Made of so much aggregate and gravestone, so little diamond and fountain water. This lament doesn’t end without hope, however: “all say the shelter is sparse, yes, // but there is space here for bones.” The melancholic hum of May’s tone lends gravity and heart to this debut collection, which might have otherwise been consumed by its conceits. May’s work is skillful and nuanced in its surprising approach to the nature (and nurture) of identity. Kamilah Aisha Moon has written one of the most moving poetry books I’ve encountered in a while. At the center of She Has a Name is a young woman with autism who, despite her high-functioning capabilities, is still subjected to the sometimes stifling overprotective behavior of her family: “We send for guardian angels— / please—sweep down in case / our love isn’t / enough.” A family dynamic—not exactly a family drama—unfolds as Moon allows the different members of the household (parents, sister Ish, and Middle Sister) to voice their anxieties, regrets, and feelings of guilt. Oldest sister Ish, who has moved away from home, feels particularly conflicted (“Each visit home frays me, / the price I pay for being able to drive away.”), especially after her parents make clear that as they “depreciate, ” the responsibility of looking out for the youngest member of the family will be hers. Ish’s relationship to her youngest sister reveals a compelling history: as much as she celebrates her sister’s triumphs—like her first vote (“a lone ballot / never counted so much”) and her dance recital—she also admits to the times she privileged her own interests instead. From the poem “Sorry”: Buried moments when I’ve forsaken you—for instance— your graduation-night dinner I skipped to see a concert. Page 122 →Such simple honesty brings to light the hushed or taboo conversations about the complex experience of growing up in a home with a family member with special needs. To Moon’s credit, she doesn’t portray Ish and her parents as burdened or martyred, but as ordinary people whose errors in judgment and impulsive thoughts are part of their individual journeys, not that of their charge. In turn, the youngest sister is also treated with dignity because she arrives at her own insights about her condition independently of her family’s perspectives, despite the fact that they’re usually within earshot. It’s only when a family member encroaches on her path that they are all reminded of how fragile this tread-carefully arrangement really is, easily susceptible to missteps. On one occasion, the young woman gets to fly solo: free to defy Autism’s gravity and simply be the passenger in seat 13E.

She was coasting, a look-ma-no-hands smile resplendent on her face. My fear shortened her ride, as I led her by the hand to the front of the line, telling the attendant to keep watch that she is different. “Why did you do that to me?!” The youngest sister, having endured embarrassment at having to climb “that short yellow bus” all this time, feels betrayed by Ish’s inability to “give her the space / to look like herself.” She Has a Name works with great sensitivity in its invitation to readers to empathize with an experience that’s largely and unnecessarily hidden from public discourse. Polite silence suggests shame and sustains a stigma against expressing, let alone validating, complicated emotions such as those felt by Ish. By Page 123 →the conclusion of the book, there are no prescriptions given or life lessons imparted; the takeaway is the intimate portrait of the family itself, which comes across as no less troubled, no more afflicted than any other, despite its unique challenges, a true testament to that family’s efforts to attain its strength: “Often all we have / are banged-up blessings.” A compassionate writer with a delicate touch, Moon navigates emotive territory with commendable grace. Roger Reeves’s King Me opens with a solemn promise: “I, Roger Reeves, hereby pledge that I will not come back / to this city, if this city will not come back to me.” The poem proceeds to list the many memories and experiences the speaker will leave behind—not an abandonment but a clearing of the mind as he embarks on a journey through history and its mistreatment of the black (usually male) body, in an attempt to regain perspective on his own place in the world. As he makes an initial sweep across the country, he must first tear off that offensive racial epithet in order to explore the narratives underneath: Think: nigger is the god of our brief salvation. Nigger in a body falling toward a horizon. Nigger in the twilight that is no longer a twilight but a black creek fumbling along the spine of a boy who is running through a city that is running out of water. Even the lions have left for the mountain. This is America speaking in translation, in glitter,

in gold grills and fried chicken. Auto-tune this if you must. One of the first stops on this journey is to Money, Mississippi, the site of the heinous murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. Followed soon after by a visit to the 1868 slave massacre at Opelousas, Louisiana, where approximately two hundred black people were killed during a frenzied “Negro hunt.” Quite deliberately, Reeves imagines the fallen set against natural landscapes (Emmett Till’s body lies next to that of a dead mare at a shoal and “does not get the luxury / of a lyric—a song that makes / our own undoing or killing sweet”; the bodies at Opelousas are cast off in a field, “the deer, there, / dead in the Page 124 →ravine”), building up to a startling indictment against the nature of racism in the poem “Southern Charm”: I refuse to explain the head and source of the South’s distemper? Oh, Hamlet, North Carolina, and the fallow winds loosing the topsoils of my lover’s body. Oh son of the mute sharecropper. Oh bent guitar and shattered body at the foot of the mockingbird, what nation, what native land does nature salute? To avoid being consumed by outrage, the speaker also looks to narratives where he can locate (and inhabit) hope, inner strength, and defiance, like Argentina’s Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who preserve the memories of the disappeared (“I, too, having lost / faith in silence have placed my faith in silence.”) and the story of Ernestine “Tiny” Davis, a groundbreaking trumpet player and feminist lesbian from the 1940s: Call me tiny, anything at all: an acorn lodged in the throat of a thrush. Choke. A claw squeezed from the purple head of a flower. Prick. A hunk of pork butt plucked from the gums and placed back onto the tongue. Gag. Then swallow. Feed me. Call my appetite a kind kingdom. Call me Queen. King me. That “kinging” resonates in other poems that speak to how the black male body is simultaneously feared and fetishized, particularly in sports and entertainment, where the media controls the popularity and desirability of the public image: “Most young kings return home without their heads.” Reeves also invokes the phenomenon called “John Henryism,” the premature death of educated black men, and the challenges of reconciling homosexuality with socially accepted values and gender roles. The casualties are everywhere, but lest these losses be in vain, the speaker pleads, “teach me / What to do with the dead I carry in my mouth, / Teach me to travel light with their bodies in my belly.” A sophisticated and breathtaking writer, Reeves takes the Page 125 →reader on a harrowing journey: each poem comes packed with arresting imagery, relentless in its examination of how tragedy and trauma become

internalized—cleaning out the wounds to understand the pain: If none of us will be remembered, then let us keep speaking with tongues light as screen doors clapping shut on a child’s finger. For this is love. May, Moon, and Reeves have written praiseworthy debuts that announce an individuality of voice and vision even as they become part of the larger Cave Canem community of distinguished writers. All three authors recognize (in the acknowledgment pages) the critical role that organization played in their development as artists, but the true responsibility is to the craft itself, to the energy that it takes to write works that will stand on their own, as examples of inspiration, discipline, and talent, as Hum, She Has a Name, and King Me undoubtedly do. Works Cited May, Jamaal. Hum. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2013. Moon, Kamilah Aisha. She Has a Name. New York: Four Way Books, 2013. Reeves, Roger. King Me. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2013.

Page 126 →

On Karankawa and The Animal Too Big to Kill Employing the Texas landscape as a metaphor for her speaker’s troubled psyche helps Iliana Rocha give shape to personal history in her exceptional debut Karankawa, winner of the 2014 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. Karankawa takes its title from the Native American culture buried under the “concrete musculature” of Lake Jackson, the setting for this emotional journey in which a young woman mourns her mother’s death and absence as she navigates the distressing terrain of womanhood. The five poems bearing the title “Creation Myth” pulse like a heartbeat at varying intervals; each one imagines the speaker’s birth, which is another way of restarting the mother-daughter relationship that came to a premature end. This bond is not idealized, however, as each birth is presented not as a blank slate but as a harbinger of things to come: “a lifetime of everyones gathers around to cigar-stork-celebrate all the ways we will surprise & disappoint.” Indeed, the past and the present are collapsed into a single plane, just like civilizations come stacked one atop the other on the same land, and therefore one cannot be explored without the other. Another connecting tissue in the book is the appearance of a number of Texas cities. Besides Lake Jackson, there’s also Wharton, Victoria, Big Bend, and Corpus Christi—places associated with different memories. A past, and a path, is mapped out with the speaker’s history of places she has live in, but so too with the notable hurricanes she has lived through. The two lists come together to chart a record of conflict and recovery. Reconstructing the broken and damaged material things becomes a valuable lesson in healing. From the poem “Wharton, TX”: Page 127 →On the porch, she stops & wonders what blew apart, recalls the hurricane where all things collided: the bluebonnets, the parakeets, the futile instruction of how to fill her empty spaces while they hurry to widen. After a violent rain, old material settles: marriage, family. Although grief becomes the prominent tone of her language, Rocha textures it with startling beauty, not as an apology for the sullen subject matter or even as a strategy for permission to write about it but as an artistic flourish that presents mourning as a complicated experience, very hurricane-like—a devastating reality but also a transcendent one. A few stand-out lines in the book include the following: “you knew how I admired horses / not just for their luck, but for the way they outrun their great sadness”; “When sleep finally comes, keep your dandelions. Let mine / be a funeral of stalks”; “I hear you died as beautifully as a yellow cloud chalked onto sidewalks”; and “If we only / had one row of stars to follow, / we would never be lost.” The second important presence in the speaker’s formative years is her father. Afflicted by alcoholism, the widower becomes an impressionable influence on his daughter’s view of herself and her sexuality. “I was born drunk,” she says matter-of-factly in one of the “Creations Myth” poems. And this intoxicated state remains a critical lens, as shown in the poem “Looking at Women,” in which the speaker asserts, “My father taught me how. His curious eyes, perpetually amber from drinking, would scan a woman, rest on a bold curve they liked: tits or ass.” And later: “My stare isn’t all that different from his—start from the face, scroll down. I love a woman in a tight dress, done up like a drag queen.”

The drag queen makes another appearance in the poem “Night Sticks (2011)—Excerpts,” in which the speaker remembers her father taking on his late wife’s domestic duties: “Dad stands in his drunk kitchen washing dishes, starching our jeans until they’re glitterbest. The body in opposites: Dad in her nightgown. I try to forget her leaving the hotel room on the tip of Florida’s penis in search of a bar.” This moment in the book is one of the most compelling since it demonstrates the inner hurricanePage 128 → of the speaker’s emotions: the yearning for her mother to be alive, the desire for her father to be sober, the love she feels for both, despite her absence, despite his distance, all swirl into a single haunting gender-fluid image. Eventually the speaker does shape her own sexual agency, beginning with the recognition of her femininity: “I noticed my own body, legs half-tree trunk, half-lightning rod.” And the poem “A Study of You, Love,” about a romantic outing in the desert, is meant to contrast with the two poems called “A Study of You, Grief, ” in which the focus is on the bodies of the deceased mother and the beleaguered father, respectively. By shifting perspective to the self, the speaker is able to imagine (and define on her own terms) the language and expression of desire in close proximity to, but not hindered by, her family values and religion. From the provocative and lively litany in “Descriptions of His Tongue”: His tongue is a bra unhooking in my mouth, a suede sofa, unhinged armoire in my mouth, cashmere wet with rain in my mouth, wrung out until it’s dry, shrunken in my mouth. Catholic, sitting on the toilet reciting prayers, Santo NiГ±o de Atocha knocking on my mouth door. Tangerine giving birth in my mouth, litter of three—no, four—in my mouth. The process of sand turned to melting glass being blown into a swan’s arch in my mouth. In the moving poem “Reconstructing the Burial from a Few Fragments,” the speaker makes a valiant effort to fortify her strength: “I won’t / pull back the dirt. I won’t confess. I won’t / regurgitate sadness—enough ghosts.” Karankawa is the evidence of the struggle to achieve that hard-won goal. It is a book that honors the dead, the past, and the history of the foundations—culture, family, memory—upon which the living build their futures and experience their bittersweet todays. Mining the Page 129 →ground beneath our feet, our emotions, Iliana Rocha tells us, is the key to gratitude and inner peace. Karankawa is remarkable poetry, impactful and, despite its gravity, a joy to read. The poetry of Shane McCrae has been celebrated for its unflinching engagement of race, identity, and trauma, particularly as experienced by a speaker who personifies the collision between whiteness and blackness. His three previous books, Mule, Blood, and Forgiveness Forgiveness (all three published within the last five years) are so close in subject matter that they create an extended narrative of one interracial speaker’s awareness of his place in the troubled American landscape. McCrae’s skillful use of the fragmented line only adds to the tension of the raw delivery of this difficult personal story embedded within the larger conversations of this country’s history of violence and racism. In his latest collection of poems, The Animal Too Big to Kill, the interracial speaker returns to his formative years, “Growing up black white trash.” This arresting self-designation becomes an unsettling chorus that challenges the reader to contend with the speaker’s unusual upbringing by a family of white supremacists:

“Growing up black white trash” meant growing up drawing swastikas on t-shirts, bemoaning the fall of the Nazi Party, and “growing up raised by nigger.” But in order to move “safely” through this racist space, the speaker has to become complicit in his invisibility: You grow up no inside you grow up void surrounding You grow up never sure you see yourself in mirrors You grow up thinking what you see / Is only it might be 90% / Accurate maybe less And though he becomes disembodied—or “skinned”—that doesn’t protect him from catching glimpses of his true self, acknowledging the inherent contradictions of his “black white trash” identity. The poem “What It Takes to Get the Attention of White Liberals” details the speaker’s need to be accepted by the white gaze, not for what it sees on the surface but for the unassailable reality of his complexity beyond the skin. The speaker, Page 130 →longing for a friendship with a white boy in the neighborhood, encounters the harsh consequences of prejudice: He sees your desperation and he hates you for it you embarrass him with his own beauty Your desperation and your ugliness what you and he have been raised to see as your ugliness embarrass him The first part of the book provides one unrelenting scene after another in which this interracial speaker who embodies both whiteness and blackness is forced to experience his childhood as if they are mutually exclusive. How does such a person transcend that damage? How does such a wound heal? The answer lies in the organizing principle of the book, which is divided into three sections subsequently labeled “Morning Prayer,” “Midday Prayer,” and “Evening Prayers.” Appealing to a higher power is one step toward salvation. The journey toward religion, however, is not expressed through a conventional “born again” narrative: redemption comes from revisiting Bible stories in terms that curtail the familiar lessons and that reach for ambiguity and open-endedness. When Jesus overturns the tables of the money-changers, for example, the speaker adds, You also cursed a fig tree never to produce / Fruit again because you have come to it hungry Lord and found it barren And in the retelling of the story of Mary anointing the feet of Jesus, the speaker wonders why the perfume wasn’t instead “sold and the money given to the poor.” These daring questions and reinterpretations show a once-repressed mind unleashed upon a plane that permits contemplation and imagination: literacy. The first hint of this need to expand his world through books is in the poem “Empathy Erases the Heart”: “Growing up black white trash you read / Poetry yes Shel Silverstein / Novels for kids about smart kids who

don’t fit in.” But with religion, the Page 131 →speaker also finds a path toward spiritual enlightenment, self-acceptance, and even forgiveness. In the title poem, which also opens the collection, the animal too big to kill is a composite of all the animals the speaker ate before he giving up eating meat. With the invocation of God, the poem reads like a biblical allegory, though the reader eventually begins to extrapolate the levels of guilt and regret embodied by this early appeal for redemption. In the longest poem of the book, “The Seven Last Words of Christ,” the words are actually statements attributed to Jesus during the crucifixion. McCrae presents the statements out of sequence, each adding a scene to the plight of the interracial speaker who is undergoing his own transformative journey. The metaphorical death and rebirth is positioned as a descent into the dreamscape of the subconscious, he’s Sure not sure whether Consequences Are part of old things Or new or separate things their own Things and so he Might be in the dream The speaker, in an act of self-discovery and recovery, must reconcile the two components of his identity and so he enters a realm—his inner sanctum—in which such a seemingly impossible existence has always been true. With inner peace comes the act of renewal, emerging from the darkness—a kind of resurrection—as a visible being with his own language in order to tell (indeed, to write) his story: Silence is for Physical reasons Outside the power Of your imagination and when you Page 132 →Try to imagine Past the blackness To nothingness The blackness goes Away but you See letters black Lower-case letters on a white

background jumbled as if they Had been dumped out Of a bag The book’s “Evening Prayers” is comprised of only two shorter poems. The first, “I Know It’s Hard for You to Believe You Still Benefit from Slavery,” asks the (white) reader/the white self to consider a historical photograph of a black boy tied to a pickaxe. The challenge is to look at the photograph not through the white gaze but through the black gaze—the speaker’s gaze, he who identifies (after his spiritual rebirth) with the black body imprisoned by/inside whiteness. As a metaphor representing his personal history, not just the history of the USA, the ability to view the imagery as both indictment of the past and as evidence of transcendence, survival, and perseverance offers a small but hard-won glimmer of hope. The interior struggle is never-ending. After all, the speaker is only human, fallible and imperfect, as shown in the closing poem, “The Calf,” in which the speaker admits that he has faltered—despite the initial guilt expressed in that prophetic opening poem “The Animal Too Big to Kill”—and has eaten meat. McCrae’s latest book is a perfect conclusion to a stunning tetralogy that approaches a difficult subject matter with a challenging use of metaphor, trope, and allegory. This delicately crafted narrative, now four books long, is a testament to a personal experience so powerful, so complicated, it needed to be revisited and reconsidered through different angles. If a fifth book, like a fifth chapter, is forthcoming, then given the history Page 133 →and success of McCrae’s previous works, it will be just as compelling and rewarding. Works Cited McCrae, Shane. The Animal Too Big to Kill. New York: Persea Books, 2015. Rocha, Iliana. Karankawa. Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015.

Page 134 →

Midcareer Three Poets and Their Four Books In the literary profession, the designation “midcareer” is open to interpretation. It’s not necessarily measured by a writer’s age but by a writer’s publications and/or the span of a writer’s participation in the field—at least one to two decades of professional life. For poets, the third book usually covers that territory, though for the more prolific one, it’s the fourth that signals entry into what is known vaguely as “midcareer.” The expectation is that four published poetry books provide enough material to establish a reputation, a trajectory, and a sense of a poet’s vision. To test that theory, I’ve decided to write a retrospective of the bodies of work by three poets whose fourth books appeared in 2015: Quan Barry, author of Loose Strife, Kyle Dargan, author of Honest Engine, and Ada LimГіn, author of Bright Dead Things. These are poets whose literary careers I’ve been following over the years and whose work continues to engage me, not only because these are three voices from distinct ethnic communities but because I’ve always appreciated the purpose and drive of their artistry. Quan Barry’s poetry outlines a sustained meditation on violence, though she has cultivated quite an expansive territory by locating violence not only in the timelines of personal and world history but also in representation, in literature and film. This broad spectrum, these multitudinous pressure points, makes a dire statement about the ubiquitous nature of damage, pain, and trauma and how they shape human imagination and expression. Asylum (2001) takes on the precarious state of safety for the exile, the political refugee, and other violated bodies or bodies in distress, such as the seven-year-old child in the poem “lullaby”,Page 135 → a victim of molestation who pens a letter to her abuser, beginning with the statement “I know what your body holds for me—shame, oil and shame.” That the subjugated subject writes her own narrative—and speaks out—is an act of empowerment. Some might even identify it as an act of healing. But Barry presents a more complicated and troubling journey for this speaker. Although her voice communicates strength and hints at conciliation, she includes a footnote in which she reveals the true undertone of her letter: “I hate you for what you are and what you did.” Suddenly her narrative expands into multiple planes of emotional language. And so what is her asylum? The letter? Or the rage that seethes beneath it? In any case, asylum is not resolution, only a shaky, temporary shelter. Barry’s reflections on this unsettling state of being take the reader to a series of unexpected places, such as a Kabuki performance in which the speaker is caught off guard by her willing surrender to fantasy and illusion, to the tale of St. Agatha whose martyrdom is nothing less than a grotesque show of loyalty to God, to Snow White’s bedchamber where the new bride comes to terms with her rescue from death-sleep only to awaken to the sleepless prison of marital obligations. The speakers, usually women, consider the bittersweet cost (and, ultimately, farce) of escape and freedom. Asylum’s figurative poems underscore the harsh lessons imparted by what serves as connecting tissue—the war poems. The opening sequence, “Child of the Enemy,” offers a harrowing family history of the daughter of a black military soldier and a Vietnamese woman. Because the parents are absent, the child grows up reaching toward the history books and imagining the circumstances surrounding the lives of the two people whose fates collided during the Vietnam War. The narrative she constructs is informed by wartime imagery and testimony, and by the small consolation of being called a survivor by still feeling like a casualty, that as a dark-skinned adoptee, she remains dislocated, even in her skin. The arresting moment in “Napalm,” in which the speaker compares herself to the military weapon, expresses the speaker’s existential crisis—she is the child of the enemy, but who is the enemy when her identity embodies opposing sides of the conflict? Page 136 →It works both ways. Clear the forests to see your enemies and your enemies see you clearly. Like all effective incendiaries,

I won’t only bloom where I’m planted. Barry’s intriguing second book, Controvertibles (2004), operates from a single premise: how is one thing like another? Each poem’s title reads like an equation (“house fire as bildungsroman,” “mal amour as disciple,” “Rage Against the Machine as Plate Tectonics”) designed to challenge the poet, who mines these unexpected pairings with moods that run the gamut from intellectual to spiritual to comical. The conceit seems to be that icons, symbols, and language are not as locked into their meanings or definitions as people want to believe—everything is fluid, a state of existence that’s misunderstood as angst-instilling uncertainty. Reading forty-nine of these poems is a daunting task but worth it. The gems stand apart, like “purdah as polemic.” Though not an unexpected pairing at first, the purdah in question turns out to be the speaker’s dark skin, which, while visiting Muslim territory, becomes subject to suspicion and scrutiny—the speaker so like the women of that country and yet, as an English speaker and a Westerner not bound to the religious mandates, so unlike them. And when the speaker, beleaguered by this treatment, pronounces her disdain for “some worlds” in which a person’s literacy might be punishable by death, the poem expands to include another timeline in another oppressive culture: the antebellum period of the American South. Clever and, at times, a bit cheeky, Controvertibles exhausts its conceit rather early in the book. Barry’s third book, Water Puppets (2011), hinges on the poem “meditations,” which offers the following stanza: There are places on the human body that will not heal due to their constantly being in motion, their flexing and such, the skin unable // to hold a scab. Throughout Water Puppets—a reference to the Vietnamese art in which a large underwater rod supports the puppet to give the illusion of autonomous movement—bodies are in motion becausePage 137 → they’re fleeing, hiding, or stirring. Something—a threat, a dilemma, an angst—is keeping them in motion, even while meditating. Such is the case for the speaker considering the six tones of her mother tongue in “learning the tones.” Language is a birthright, but the wound of displacement, of being torn away from one’s culture, is a wound that’s prodded each time the speaker encounters it: “Who would I be if I had stayed?” she ponders, and later, “even the sound of the word sad / slides down my face.” Though Vietnam as an emotional landscape continues to have the strongest pull in Water Puppets, Barry also visits South America and the Middle East, the peripatetic poet yet another body in motion as she considers the ruins of political and religious persecution, the cultures above ground as unstable as the fault lines below and so, in “lament,” the poet’s cry: “believe me: it never stops.” And indeed, it continues into book four. Loose Strife (in which half the poems bear the same two-word title) engages Greek mythology more aggressively than she did in her previous books as she considers how the tragedies of the world echo Greek dramas and archetypes, such as this event, which she connects to the story of Agamemnon and Iphigenia: “Two days ago in India a man / decapitated his daughter then stalked through the village // swinging her head like a lantern. He was angry / at the way she lived her life.” The indictment against humanity is that over the course of its history it is simply performing the same plays. And although there’s a “small light burning at the bottom / of the jar” (the flicker of hope in Pandora’s box), everyone’s still walking into “annihilating daylight.” There are “so many ways to be erased.” The existential pulse is strong in the pages of Loose Strife because of the unrelenting evidence that human life (particularly female life) is collateral damage to humanity’s political machinations and cultural dogmata. Values that are designed for instruction are (mis)used for destruction. And all for what? The pessimist and the optimist can debate this to infinity. Barry expresses it best with the poem “variation,” in which she

compares the disparate tones in the conclusions to Solaris: Andrei Tarkovsky’s film adaptation ended on the cosmonaut’s triumphant Page 138 →arrival at the new planet, while in StanisЕ‚aw Lem’s novel that same space traveler continued to question human relevance: “[Solaris] bore my weight without noticing me any more than it would a speck of dust.” Barry clearly attempts to steer her readers toward the more reflective stance, with a preference for the pessimistic view: “Sadly it is easier to become like matter than to become like light.” An intriguing aesthetic choice in this book is Barry’s use of the self-referential. She gives herself permission to participate in the narrative, admitting, in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way, how obsessed she is with violence. She includes a few citations from previous book reviews (some unflattering) and offers glimpses into her creative process—“Let yourself remember,” she writes, “Let it be your way to the poem”—and her artistic doubts: “How many times can I appropriate a story that is not mine to tell?” Some of this initially comes across as unnecessary exposition but turns out to be a declaration of a calling to follow a most disquieting muse, a sustained exploration of a moment of despair expressed in Aeschylus’s Oresteia: “Where will it end? / Where will it sink to sleep and rest, this murderous hate, this Fury?” Loose Strife, which ultimately stitches together the dark history of humanity into a single volume of verse, is Barry’s most compelling response yet to that question: hate doesn’t end, hate doesn’t stop. Kyle Dargan is a poet whose work navigates between the political and philosophical, and his poems are fueled frequently by a fearlessness in expressing curiosity, wonder, and critique. He questions his place in the various environments he inhabits, he questions the existence of those environments, their origins and purposes—all explorations in service to coming to terms with our culture’s ever-shifting tectonic plates. His debut The Listening (2004) reads like a tribute to the communities that shaped his understanding of the doors that open or will remain closed to a young black man in college. In the poem “Satin Touch,” for example, the speaker feels out of place in a black female hair salon, but his shared ethnic background with the women, despite their differences, eventually sets him at ease: “They know I’m a university kid—book in hand, twangless Page 139 →speech / but slang enough to gain trust. [The hairdresser] says something about // my Indian hair. I think slave master and say nothing.” And when he pays for the service, “a carnal tension / unhinges” at eye contact, reminding him of the gendered power dynamic that he had submitted to from the moment he entered the shop. In another poem, “nap • i • ness,” the speaker’s hair being sculpted at a black barbershop is the reminder of difference and distance between his African roots and American indoctrination: “I learned someone has edited / my text with different blood / than it was fashioned in— / loosening pages like lye / so the words wouldn’t twist or dreadlock.” He concludes, “I am an enigma— / living one history, combing another.” The speaker’s advanced education becomes an important component of his identity, particularly because in college he encountered those influential writers—Robert Hayden, Yusef Komunyakaa, Etheridge Knight among them—who textured his view of the world, particularly as a man. In “Halfway House” the speaker finds himself sheltering his indigent father. When the favor grows into a burden, he reaches, like many of his literary mentors, for a spiritual passage in order to attain strength, perspective, and language: “As a nibs begins to threaten the dawn, I think // вЂremember, no water, fire this time’— / the world re-members through fire this time.” The important presence of the literary community in his life is what inspires the speaker to end the book with an empowering declaration: We are a poet who decomposes what the world grows and grows

from what the world decomposes. In Bouquet of Flowers (2007) Dargan transforms everyday but impressionable encounters into moments of education or clarity, as in “Edgar the Security Guard on Poetry.” Forced to complete his degree in order to earn his military rank, Edgar confesses his Page 140 →disinterest in poetry, so the well-meaning speaker recommends a title written by Vietnam veteran turned poet Bruce Weigl. Edgar’s response: “I’ll try this Song of Napalm. I knew fire, / but it never sounded like music.” The intended lesson bounces back to teach the speaker. That the exchange becomes amplified to reach a political and emotional pitch is one illustration of Dargan’s various “boarding points”—this in reference to the poem by that name that traces the speaker’s journey by bus, in which any offhand comment, any random image, can invite reflection and reveal poignancy. At notable times, the “boarding points” manifest themselves as paternal figures, for better or for worse. Besides Edgar the security guard, there’s also George Carlin, Colin Powell (as guest speaker at a school assembly), a German stranger on a train, and even the stone memorial honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. These men serve as surrogate, if sometimes serendipitous, guides for the speaker, whose father has vanished from his path. Only the poem “The Father” invokes the absent parent, but he remains formless—a “spirit,” a “silence.” Although Bouquet of Flowers also reaches for politically charged events such as George W. Bush’s ushering in another war with the Middle East and the devastating history of New Orleans, pre- and post-Katrina, these poems tinged with personal hues are the ones that have lasting resonance. Logorrhea Dementia (2010)—subtitled A Self-Diagnosis—is framed by poems that explain further the context of this affliction: the book opens with “Entropy,” in which the speaker declares, “Hear Ye, / I could not be silent :: Silence translates / into all things and nothings,” and closes with “My Ban-Kai,” which states, “The world will hear my agony.” The speaker, suffering battle fatigue, acknowledges moments of confusion, despair, anxiety, and heartache—and the need to unburden the self through story and language. In the poem “Letter Home No. 3” (the first two letters can be found in Bouquet of Flowers) the speaker writes to communicate his impressions after visiting Pennsylvania territory. As a site bearing the memory of civil war, the landscape’s injuries are still palpable: Page 141 →There are only graves here, spires, limestone hunks with bronze scabs of history and grass the color of spoiled regret. That awareness of trauma echoes the first two lines of “Conflict Chic” (“All around you are lands where the word / tomorrow vapors at room temperature.”), affirming that America continues to be a “wounded empire” that disaffects its populations. In “Try Again” beleaguered commuters are “bodies eager to be / not-bodies”; in “Men Die Miserably for Lack” we are told most men will die the death of mutts, “barely a tally,” and “no ink will be shed for them.” In such an environment, survival (as explained in “A History of Fear”) is precarious at best, particularly for its citizens of color: “Evolution has only been / an evacuation route from divine wrath, / ran from the horseman, / ran from the runners who’d learned / to eat other runners.” No cure for logorrhea dementia exists, though its symptom—talking—comes equipped with its own relief, its own treatment: breathing. First, second, and third breaths is how Dargan divides the book—each section a unit of emotional release that, for all its unleashing, manages moments of grace like the following, which reads like the

speaker’s artistic statement of purpose: Rest me for one day atop my revenue’s palate, then shroud me and ship my body to my motherВ .В .В . Tell her I died saving all of you from drowning— that beneath water I spun then stilled slowly like a coin dropped on its side. Grace is the ingredient that lifts Honest Engine out of the realm of the distress that infuses Logorrhea Dementia and into a more hopeful plane, one in which the speaker dares to challenge his community at large to do better, to be better. In “China Syndrome” the speaker, after a visit to that country, is impressed Page 142 →by its technological ingenuity, by its hunger for improvement. And so he questions whether that drive is still part of privileged, complacent America: I want our American generation to cure something major—erase one smudge from humanity’s horizon. When did it come to be that good ideas only migrate here? Instead of aiming for collaboration, this country has become increasingly polarized. The poem “House Divided” speaks to the nation’s current climate of racial strife: “In my America, my father / awakens again thankful that my face / is not the face returning his glare / from above eleven o’clock news / murder headlines.” America is on the brink of collapsing because it’s been reduced to “a flimsy Babel / tower, ” noisy with competing motivations and desires. Despite these protestations, the speaker keeps coming back to the idea of “home.” Home—not only a place of shelter and belonging but also evidence of sentimental value and personal history—is worth struggling for. In “Ownership” he declares, “I belong to that house / more than it belongs to me.” And so when the speaker ponders China and Egypt, as he travels by bus, subway, or train, he muses homeward and eventually redirects his story to the United States, to memories of a New Jersey childhood and other comfort zones that no matter how troubled will unequivocally welcome him. There are two honest engines at work in the book—the brain and the heart. The first looks at the exterior of the house and processes it intellectually and critically, the second considers its interior to appreciate the intimacies that make a home. One of those intimacies is grief, which is a current that runs through Honest Engine, grief informed by religious

faith. In “Words for the Departed,” the speaker considers death through a philosophical lens: “We are born / to leave this place. We are born / to eventually enter another.” Those left behind find mercy in memory, since the task for the living is “not calling our lost back but / proving they once stood among us.” It’s a sentiment that’s echoed in “Dirge in April”: Page 143 →First, this loss of blossoms—a small heartbreak followed by bit-lip humming that somehow heals. Honest Engine’s ultimate lesson is that home is the place of the necessary labors. And as the book that highlights a four-volume journey though the rough terrains of America, it’s a refreshingly prayerful and sympathetic view. Ada LimГіn is a poet whose work often reaches for the metaphor and the arresting image that can give shape to uncertainty and limn with redemption the uncomfortable truths of everyday life. These transformations are not disguises or acts of denial. They do not evade reality, they widen its path, providing a different access—perhaps mercifully—to the emotionally draining human experiences. LimГіn’s first two books, Lucky Wreck (2006) and This Big Fake World (2007), were published only months apart but have startlingly disparate tones. The poems in Lucky Wreck tend to have speakers who are negotiating the loss of safety and innocence as they step into the wreckage of the broken world. In the “The Unbearable, ” for example, the speaker protests as her grandmother mindlessly rattles off the week’s tragic headlines. Frazzled, she retreats into her childhood: “in my mind, I had already left the room and walked / up the street to the house I grew up in and laid / down outside on the green cement.” But the house is only a refuge in the distant past, as explained in “Spring, 1989.” Since that date, when a mass murderer wreaked havoc in the town, the townspeople have been “looking over / their shoulder for a dark enemy and one girl [the lone survivor of the massacre], / over and over, returning to us—in a familiar shape, / a good object, a hope in the weeds.” Locating hope in “a good object” is a coping mechanism LimГіn keeps coming back to. In “The Ladybugs Grow Bolder Every Year” the speaker, projecting her difficult times onto the tenacious insect, imagines herself “into that one red thing.” Throughout the book, in fact, there are many little things—little day, little kindness, little obsession—the diminutive does not Page 144 →lessen or diminish, it makes the overwhelming somehow finite and the unruly, manageable. By contrast, This Big Fake World (subtitled “a story in verse”) builds a stage that spotlights four unassuming characters (a businessman, his wife, his friend Lewis, and his love interest, the woman at the hardware store) whose passions intersect and disconnect to tell a very big story about love. The hero of the story is one of countless businessmen whose suit “looked / like barbed wire.” Stuck in a dull profession and in a lifeless marriage, he recognizes what a small man he is so “he wishes for things smaller”—to collapse the town to the size of a snow globe and shake things up, particularly his wife. And he distances himself from her and makes repeated visits to the hardware store to see his secret crush, he lacks the courage to make a move although the woman at the hardware store “wants to be a wall in his house where he hammers the nails.” As the businessman’s marriage dissolves and his unrequited love evolves, his best friend, Lewis, writes penpal letters to President Reagan about his boring little life. This is Lewis’s attempt at reaching out, like his friend, for something grand and remarkable. In one letter, chatting about the whale shark he saw on TV, Lewis confesses, “I want that swallowing mouth all to myself. I want it to take me in, in its big mouth, and keep me there until I grow old in its warm, warm belly, floating in this big fake world.” Attaching himself to someone

more important makes him feel important, but hungering for connection makes this sad, lonely man just like every other human. As a study of relationships—why people long for them or run from them—This Big Fake World packs plenty into a “story in verse” that celebrates the unheralded heroes of their own quiet but significant dramatic plays: Shouldn’t we make fire out of everyday things, build something out of too many nails and not wonder if we are right to build without permission from the other dull furniture? Sharks in the Rivers (2010) works from the premise that life is a tough, but survivable, journey and that perseverance can be Page 145 →a redemptive experience that leads to grace, beauty, and inner strength. “The Widening Road” asks “When did the world begin to push us so quickly?” But instead on fixating on an answer, the more immediate response is to keep the self centered: “today it is enough / that she desires and desires. That she is a body // in the world, wanting, the wind itself becoming // her own wild whisper.” This self-sufficiency is echoed in “High Water”: when the tide is high, “We become our own land sometimes.” Because the elements are frequently invoked in the book, the animal kingdom participates as a symbol of energy, will, and empowerment. “Territory” offers an extensive list of animal spirits within the body, any one of them called forth at the appropriate moment: “Cowbird and grackle, black phoebe. / Every one of us has a bear inside / (a scorpion, a rattlesnake).” Birds play a more active role than the sharks invoked in the title, particularly in the sequence of poems “Fifteen Balls of Feathers.” During a lengthy and emotionally draining journey, the speaker reaches for the pre-Columbian myth of Huitzilopochtli (the Aztec sun and war god) because of his close association to the hummingbird—the perfect symbol (like the human heart) of fighting spirit and vulnerability. Each heartache, each personal devastation, leaves a battle scar—evidence of damage, certainly, but also of fortitude: My invisible birds are still intact, I can open myself up and show you, they have muscled deep into an actual nest of suspended song. After mining the sweat of human struggle in her last three books, it’s quite fitting that in Bright Dead Things LimГіn should embrace a more celebratory mood. The title is misleading only until the reader reaches “I Remember the Carrots,” in which the speaker proclaims, “I haven’t given up on trying to live a good life, / a really good one even.” The bright dead things are the fruits of the earth, the fruits of one’s labor—work hard and reap the rewards. There is much appreciation expressed for a life lived keenly attuned to the small yet meaningful ingredients of one’s Page 146 →surroundings—the noble horse, the loyal dog, and, in “The Rewilding,” the many tiny miracles of nature, “the native field flourishing selfishly, only for itself.” Life and beauty don’t need the human gaze to exist, but recognizing their blessedness produces joy. And from this joy the drive to move through the darker days, such as in “What Remains Grows Ravenous,” in which the speaker considers her

father after the death of her stepmother: “The word widower looks like window. / Something you can see yourself in, in the dark.” In the face of mortality and impending loss, of what no longer is or might not be, the self hungers for light and love. But so too when the good times are threatened, such as in the love poem “State Bird,” in which the speaker preserves a relationship by following her sweetheart to a place outside her comfort zone: “whatever state you are, I’ll be that state’s bird, / the loud, obvious blur of song people point to / when they wonder where it is you’ve gone.” A current of grief runs through Bright Dead Things that amplifies its moments of grace. Many times the speaker seems to be standing at the precipice of emotion, feeling all the more fortunate because of the precariousness of her position. “Midnight, Talking about Our Exes,” for example, illustrates that sentiment perfectly: “Let’s be owls tonight, stay up / in the branches of ourselves, wide-eyed, / perched on the edge of euphoric plummet.” This perch is neither recklessness nor resignation but (as explained in “We Are Surprised”) the new way of living with the world inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost. You and me, are us and them, and it and sky. It’s hard to believe we didn’t know that before; it’s hard to believe we were so hollowed out, so drained, only so we could shine a little harder when the light finally came. Page 147 →A poet whose verse exudes warmth and compassion, LimГіn is at the height of her creative powers, and Bright Dead Things is her most gorgeous book of poems. As seasoned poets, Barry, Dargan, and LimГіn have indeed arrived at midcareer with excellent fourth books, which, interestingly enough, have remained faithful to many of the themes and preoccupations established in their debuts. This is not to declare the four books a cycle, but rather to acknowledge the rich landscapes on which these poets have been cultivating their art—one book is harvested not too far from another, yet each book stands independently of the rest. The true measure of a good poet is how well he or she builds upon the strengths of the previous work and keeps the new material freshly engaged with the linguistic, intellectual, or emotional pleasures of poetry. Barry, Dargan, and LimГіn, at midcareer, have reached a milestone that recognizes past accomplishments and that generates excitement for the body of work yet to come. Works Cited Barry, Quan. Asylum. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. Barry, Quan. Controvertibles. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. Barry, Quan. Loose Strife. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. Barry, Quan. Water Puppets. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011. Dargan, Kyle. Bouquet of Hungers. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007.

Dargan, Kyle. Honest Engine. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Dargan, Kyle. The Listening. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. Dargan, Kyle. Logorrhea Dementia: A Self-Diagnosis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. LimГіn, Ada. This Big Fake World. Long Beach, CA: Pearl Editions, 2007. LimГіn, Ada. Bright Dead Things. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2015. LimГіn, Ada. Lucky Wreck. Pittsburgh, PA: Autumn House Press, 2006. LimГіn, Ada. Sharks in the River. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2010.

Page 148 →

Twelve Essential Latino Poetry Books AlarcГіn, Francisco X. From the Other Side of Night/Del otro lado de la noche: New and Selected Poems. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002. In the poem “Pobres poetas / Poor Poets” Francisco X. AlarcГіn describes bards as romantic, sensitive, and even heavenly possessors of a wisdom whose magnitude and power not even they can measure. The final stanza closes the poem with the expectation that one day they’ll finally use that key they carry forever in their pockets. AlarcГіn makes good on that pledge by putting together From the Other Side of Night/Del otro lado de la noche: New and Selected Poems, in which he offers his readership a strong and generous selection of poetry from his nine previous volumes (excluding his award-winning quartet of children’s titles) along with fourteen previously uncollected poems. Known for his minimal use of language, AlarcГіn long ago mastered the brief line, paring down the poem to the essential words that “fill up / pages / (like) tattoos / puncture / flesh” but that demand both notice and accountability. And unlike decorative body art, each piece in this book is introduced less as a statement of personal expression and more as a call to action; his subject matter remains courageously political, seeking risks, not safety, in these volatile times when much of American poetry still shies away from social issues. Page 149 →AlarcГіn is uncompromisingly frank about the different oppressions of the Americas, and his work makes powerful affirmations: • Concerning people of color, as in the epistolary poem “Carta a AmГ©rica / Letter to America,” in which the speaker is a collective of the disenfranchised, naming among other things the struggles of life in the United States with the accusatory list you fear us you yell at us you hate us you shoot us your mourn us you deny us • Concerning women, as in “Cuarto oscuro / Dark Room,” in which the speaker points out the “cell without / windows” in every household where the women live, to which the men are oblivious. • Concerning language, as in “Sonnet XV,” which states, “words are rusted keysВ .В .В . screws that can undo an empire.” • Concerning gays, as in “Bienaventurados / Blessed,” in which the speaker, echoing the Sermon on the Mount, declares, blessed

the exiles of love the queer in spirit.

However, not all of his work highlights activism and social responsibility. In the selections from the book of sonnets De amor oscuro/Of Dark Love, AlarcГіn summons as muse Federico GarcГ-a Lorca, who in a previous book had “planted / a kiss like / an Andalusian / sun” on the poet’s lips. What results is a sensual and playfully erotic collection of love sonnets in free verse with echoes of Neruda. And in the selections from the American Book Award–winningPage 150 → title Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation, AlarcГіn bridges cultural perspectives, histories, and civilizations through a groundbreaking conversation of poetic tongues using Spanish, English, and Nahuatl. A rarity among Chicano poets, AlarcГіn writes most of his work in Spanish. But for those of us who are not bilingual, the book comes with superb English translations by AlarcГіn’s longtime translator, the poet Francisco AragГіn. (A glossary of the Nahuatl terms is included.) This is a brave collection of poetry that should confirm AlarcГіn’s status as a premier laureate of Chicano letters. CГЎrdenas, Brenda. Boomerang. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2010. Brenda CГЎrdenas opens Boomerang with a poem that describes a woman on an artistic mission: “Stumbling through the clutter of language, she rummages cramped closets for her lost sounds—i griega y erre—tumbling like marbles spilled in the attic.” What follows is the fruits of that labor, a collection of memory telling and music making that springs from the multiple tongues that are the poet’s birthright. Her teachers include the imaginative Abuelo with his folktales, like the one he uses to explain a mole on his arm, which he claims is a severed bird’s beak. But the true lesson is the Spanglish delivery: SГ-, his beak in my arm, and I twisted and I twisted en cГ-rculos, around and around, until his beak broke off right in my muscle. Y ya, mira, tengo su nariz en mi brazo. And then there’s TГ-a Elia, who “put magic spice in the food, made it taste like what people might eat in heaven / or Mexico.” And Uncle Karel, an Eastern European: He taught me to say English in German: I vant to go to verk.

Page 151 →Then we tried to add Spanish but wound up sounding like Hansel and Gretel in a taquerГ-a. From this childhood appreciation of culture and an early affinity for linguistic play rises the mature voice of a strong woman who sings the praises of el mestizaje (“if you can’t dig la mezcla, chale!”), who can chew on a poem in Old English and spit it back out in Old Chicano English (“Language lies / across the barbed lines”), and who wistfully pronounces, “We work in English / make love in Spanish / and codeswitch past our indecision.” Poetry doesn’t remain localized in the family for CГЎrdenas, though she acknowledges that family is the origin of the poet’s education. Eventually she seeks other muses and passions, declaring her solidarity with the Zapatistas, identifying with the indigenous textures of Chicano art and with the seductive rhythms of Chicago blues, and celebrating Chicana feminist writers like CherrГ-e Moraga and Lorna Dee Cervantes, whose street-wise verse is invoked in the poem “Me and My Cuz.” At the conclusion of Boomerang, CГЎrdenas returns to the early impulses of the book—the expression of “mestizo memory” and its many languages. The closing poem, “Zacuanpapalotls,” is both an elegy to poet JosГ© Antonio Burciaga and an invocation of his pro-community, pro-raza legacy and no-borders principles: We are— one life passing through the prism of all others, gathering color and song, cempazuchitl and drum to leave a rhythm scattered on the wind, dust tinting the tips of fingers as we slip into our new light. What makes Boomerang shine as a Chicano book is that, though CГЎrdenas doesn’t shy away from engaging such familiar territory as family, language, and raza identity, these subjects are given fresh direction and energy as she wields her poetic powers with sensitivity, intelligence, and skill. Page 152 → De Luna, Blas Manuel. Bent to the Earth. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2005. Out of the Central California Valley comes a startling voice, one whose haunting imagery and language quietly and heartbreakingly unsettle the senses. Blas Manuel De Luna’s Bent to the Earth is a powerful debut that commands immediate respect for its polish and politics. The title poem offers a quick introduction to the speaker’s youth as a child of Mexican farm laborers. The workers’ van is forced off the road, the child awakens to immigration officers, their batons already out,

already looking for the soft spots on the body, to my mother being handcuffed. This family is eventually spared deportation through the bittersweet charity of the green card that traps laborers “between the hard-packed earth and the darkening sky.” Others are not so lucky. Those deportees must then decide “if it is better to cross, or if it is better, somehow, to live with desire.” As the speaker matures and moves out of the place where people work to exhaustion, “giving up the fire of their lives,” he recognizes My Fresno people are fading. It is starting already, memory betraying me, taking what it will of all I love, making all of it, all of it, disappear. He asks himself: “How will I find my way?” But the roads to remembrance are many and varied. “Trains” links the speaker as poetry reader to his high school days, when “all that shining grease, all that shadowy steel” is recalled, viscerally, as a harbinger of death. There are also the photographs of Robert Capa and SebastiГЈo Salgado, whose portraits of hardship Page 153 →send the poet back to the homestead where “darkness seems to go on forever.” In the final section of the book, De Luna demonstrates his gorgeous skill for the lyrical, with poems referencing personal heartache and loss. Of note is “The Sky above Your Grave,” which details an Asian-inspired ceremony to a brother, an accident victim: I have written you a letter, placed it in one of our mother’s glass bowls, burned it at your grave, the ashes and heat darkening the glass, the smoke stinging my eyes, the smoke rising into a lovely and empty sky. One of De Luna’s recurring motifs is the collapse of distance between the sky and the ground, either through the act of falling (from a ladder, from a building, and with a nose-diving airplane) or by connecting those extremities through ethereal bridges, like smoke, air, night, and light. In both cases, the heavens, like a laborer, are bent to the earth, perhaps from the burden of a promise of bliss. Intelligent and evocative, Bent to the Earth is a melancholy dialogue with this world and the next. And Blas Manuel De Luna is a poet of meticulous craft, carving out a striking volume of verse that dares to move a step beyond the place where others have paused:

Death is the mother of beauty said Stevens, and he was right, but there was more. Beauty is the child of death; he has her ears and mouth, her eyes. Dominguez, David. Work Done Right. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003. Heir to the legacy of Gary Soto, Philip Levine, Juan Felipe Herrera, and other California poets whose art rises from the raw beauty of the working-class experience, David Dominguez Page 154 →makes his impressive debut with a sequence of narrative poems titled Work Done Right. Given the biblical name Abraham, “father of all nations,” and the surname Tovar, like the prized bulls, the speaker of this collection takes readers along his heart-wrenching journey to unravel a destiny that distinguishes him from his appellation. He makes his declaration in the poem “Mi Historia”: I wanted my own history—not the Earth’s, nor the history of blood, nor of memory, and not the job found for me at Galdini Sausage. I sought my own—a new bruise to throb hard as the asphalt that pounded the chassis of my truck. A dreamer, Abraham sets out for financial independence and finds employment with Galdini Sausage, only to discover the hardship and exhaustion of an industrial prison. From the production room, where “the grinder, mixer, stuffer, and wrapper” groan as the employees take their stations, to the brief respites at lunch when they eat, “the tired body taking back what the work took,” to the inevitable overtime—the mind is haunted by the images of pig blood, the imagination tainted by “thoughts of pork.” The routine tasks provide Abraham time to ruminate about family and Mexico. He romanticizes the particularities of rural life, such as his grandfather, his grandfather’s guayabera, and his grandfather’s ranchito: How sometimes, under the stars rolling under barbed wire, toward another day of work, and yet another, the only thing worth touching is something of home gracious enough to say, “Close your eyes now and sleep.” Although the pangs of nostalgia make him long for home, he feels the need to resist, move forward, and come to terms with his present, even if it’s not what he expected. Abraham’s maturity is helped along by seasoned workers like Guillermo: Page 155 →Guillermo worked like a man who, up before dawn,

read the paper over juice and toast, and then, as he walked the empty streets toward a factory that offered nothing, realized there was nothing but work done right. Abraham becomes attuned to the worker’s plight and slowly recognizes that the world he desires is larger than what the factory offers. A tragic accident will be the greatest life lesson, severing Abraham’s ties to Galdini Sausage. He will finally leave place and memory on his own terms, with a newfound appreciation for ephemeral life. And like the eucalyptus along Highway 99, he’ll be “sloughing down to (the) skin for the stars,” a wiser man. The startling imagery of “the unyielding memory of pig” juxtaposed with Dominguez’s perceptive insights on humanity create a moving tale of loss and redemption worth multiple readings. “Work Done Right” is a coming-of-age story in verse and as captivating as a border corrido. Dominguez, the newest minstrel, sings it beautifully. Espada, MartГ-n.The Republic of Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. MartГ-n Espada is back in full form with his eighth book of poems,The Republic of Poetry, a collection that pays homage to the art of poetry as both a political and a curative power. Invoking the country of Chile and its Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda as muses and models for a utopian world in which poems are the essence of everyday life, Espada writes, In the republic of poetry, monks print verses about the night on boxes of monastery chocolates, kitchens in restaurants use odes for recipes Page 156 →from eel to artichoke, and poets eat for free. Though this republic is the goal, Espada keeps the dream grounded by pointing out what a hard-won victory this will be, and has been even for Chile: he reminds readers of the 1973 U.S.-backed coup against President Salvador Allende, the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet, and the murder of political dissident and folk singer VГ-ctor Jara. But dictatorships are mortal, too, and in a poem about Pinochet’s visit to a bookstore, the poet declares, “No books turned to ash at his touch / nor did his eyes glow red with a demon’s heat.” Poetry prevails. Neruda, it is believed, successfully dismissed an invasive military presence from his home with the phrase “There is only one danger for you here: poetry.” From these historical events comes the cry of the people (indeed, the world): For thirty years

we have been searching for another incantation to make the soldiers vanish from the garden. The second thread of Espada’s project is in praise or honor of people with particular importance to the poet, including other bards like Robert Creeley and Julia de Burgos. Espada does recognize, however, that even poetry as vehicle for expression has limitations. In the poem “Not Words but Hands,” inspired by the tragic deaths of the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa’s partner and their son, Espada writes, “But we have no words for you; / there is no name for the grief in your face.” Espada closes the book with a section titled “The Weather-Beaten Face,” a series of personal poems about the poet’s growth as an artist in the broken world and how “somewhere between the rockets and the songs” lies the quiet that allows for reflection, healing, and hope. Page 157 →The collection comes full circle as Espada invokes the verses of Puerto Rican poet Clemente Soto VГ©lez and absorbs them into his being so as to learn how to live—the first step toward the founding of a republic of poetry. Facing the fact of the inability to procreate after his wife’s hysterectomy, the speaker turns to poetry for comfort, guidance, and emotional release. “The Republic of Poetry” will no doubt offer the same for those who need to listen to the testimonies that give direction to the place where “troops drown in a monsoon of desert flowers tossed by the crowd.” MartГ-n Espada is indeed a worthy prophet for a better world. HernГЎndez, Tim Z. Skin Tax. Berkeley, CA:Heyday Books, 2005. Perhaps it’s too reductionistic to call Tim Z. HernГЎndez a performance poet, or to label his debut book of poetry “spoken word.” Though his voice and rhythms surely benefit from the energy behind a microphone and a slam arena, the complexity of his ideas merits the slower pace of study made possible through the written pages of Skin Tax. As a Central California Valley poet, HernГЎndez will be compared to that region’s luminaries, including Gary Soto and Juan Felipe Herrera. And though HernГЎndez does favor an exploration of his community’s local citizens (like Soto) and also tends to leap-frog from sensory image to sensory image (like Herrera), his tackling of male sexuality gives him a distinct poetic edge. Indeed, the entire project does become a thorough critique of machismo and of the gender expectations in the Latino community that shape a male’s behavior, especially toward females. As the poem “I Rub My Hands” demonstrates, even in postcoital rapture the male doesn’t let his guard down: spooning hot soup into one another’s open mouth I peer inside and wonder

Page 158 →if the bed of my tongue exposed looks as tender and vulnerable as yours if I am a man then you will not see the inside of my mouth take in anything On many occasions, lust is expressed as the uncontrollable male urge, reaching heights of desire that make the speaker cry out “I’ve got needs!” And at times, this yearning is laced with the threat of power over the woman, as in the poem “I’d Be a Lying Man,” which imagines pulling back that zipper peeling you out from rinds digging you to core juice, seed, and pulp Skin Tax, as the title suggests, is an exhausting reverie on the flesh, but also a condemnation of socialization that doesn’t move love past the physical: growing up on handshakes and shoulder pummels I only touched a face for sexual gain or simple love but never in the pure act of public affection—never. The fourth part of the book, “Death & Blossoms,” shifts slightly in tone, but this is a welcome breather. Here Hernandez focuses on some notable outsiders, like C-Dog, the youth accused of patricide, and Lonely, the resident transsexual exploited by the men hungering for easy sex. And bringing the book to a close is a touching elegy to the late Chicano poet AndrГ©s Montoya. Much emotion and little reconciliation are packed into Skin Page 159 →Tax. This is less of a flaw and more of a challenge to readers to consider the dangerous practices of Latino masculinity that have males “swinging machetes beneath their breaths.” The struggle, proclaims the speaker, is one against violence, “as if in defiance of my own skin.”

Herrera, Juan Felipe. 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1972–2007. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2008. With 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border, Juan Felipe Herrera has combed through no fewer than nine of his previously published books and chapbooks to map out nearly forty years of political writings and to celebrate a lifelong commitment to literary activism. Herrera calls these works “undocuments” in solidarity with the Mexican population that has labored, with and without official papers, as low-wage workers. His collection of poems, journal entries, and experimental performance pieces is his effort to “document” a history of struggle and survival within a hostile antiimmigrant climate. The conflicted relationship between Mexicans and the country that employs them and ejects them is told bitingly through Herrera’s trademark litanies: You say tomato we say salsa You say potato we say papas You eat lettuce we irrigate lettuce You eat grapes we pick grapes You decorate Xmas trees we farm Xmas trees But later in the same poem, Herrera shifts gears from opposite extremes to borderless commonalities, pointing out the fallacy of insisting Mexicans are foreigners: You read Stephen King we read Stephen King You climb Half Dome we climb Half Dome You lost someone in the war we lost someone in the war You download Alicia Keyes we download Alicia Keyes Page 160 →Herrera devotes many of his pieces to honoring the unsung heroes of political protest, from the marchers on the historic “Day without a Mexican” on March 6, 2006, to the Chicano iconoclast and El Paso native JosГ© Antonio Burciaga, “ese Tin-Tan del Chuko,” to the mothers who continue their search for answers to the murders of hundreds of young women along the border: The mothers are not mothers anymore They are the black center where you dwell They are the churn howl creation where you rise again Though Herrera’s political writings lean toward accessible language, he still manages to slip into the more dynamic and playful wordplay he’s known for. Indeed, his “poesy mad & Chicano-style done unwild” comes through clear in poems like “Punk Half Panther”: Lissen to the whistle of the night bats—

oye como va, in the engines, in the Chevys and armed Impalas, the Toyota gansta’ monsters, surf of the new world colony definitions & quasars & culture prostars going blam But the focus of this project continues to be the trek through the chronicles of AztlГЎn, where the downtrodden sing to “revolution guitars.” In his foreword, Stephen Kessler notes that Herrera’s words are “more like footprints—running feet, trudging feet, marching feet, dancing feet—feet on the move propelled by their own momentum.” The observation is accurate. Herrera’s poetics and politics are constantly on the go, energizing each page of this extraordinary Floricanto, where power and poetry meet. 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border is a momentous achievement for this activist writer who declares, “I didn’t start out to be a poet. Because I had been silenced, I started out to be a speaker.” Page 161 → Luna, Sheryl. Pity the Drowned Horses. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. The inaugural winner of the AndrГ©s Montoya Poetry Prize, former El Pasoan Sheryl Luna’s Pity the Drowned Horses is a heartfelt testimony from the borderlands, the place where “music clanks like chains” as history simultaneously crumbles and rebuilds itself, where “weary dancers laugh anger away.” By design, Luna’s favorite words suggest body structure—bone, marrow, and muscle. Each poem reads like a blueprint to memory. At work is the finely crafted architecture of a skillful poet at home in her element, as in the opening poem: I remember that the bare cemetery stones in El Paso and JuГЎrez hold the music, and each spring when the winds carry the dust of loss there is a howl, a surge of something unbelievable, like death, like the collapse of language, like the frail bones of Mexican grandmothers singing. The delicate balance between north and south, life and death, but “neither English nor Spanish; something of both” teeters on a very risky poetic strategy: scattering stanzas with a profusion of sensory images. But Luna never fails to surprise in the end, gathering the reins to reveal her startling portraits. The poem “An Atheist Learns to Pray,” for example, spirals out into the night but concludes with the knockout lines Blessed be the way caught among showers, the sun later rising like a man listening to God.

Luna understands how binary pairs create tension, and how differing perspectives thrive side by side in the allinclusive borderlands. In the poem “Two Girls from JuГЎrez,” two students challenge a poem’s equation of whiteness with good and blackness with evil. In the context of their racialized landscape, “where language is shadow and sunlight between leaves,” meanings are more complicated, and the richer for it. Page 162 →But lest this book be easily categorized as a straightforward homage, the speaker warns, “I am not writing delicate silver birds or some Southwest aubade.” Indeed, the poetry refuses to succumb to sentimentality and adopts the voice of authority and hard-edged experience, of one who breathes the border’s legacy because she has to, and needs to: My blood, of necessity, will eventually seep into the desert; it is the way of my people; it is the way of all people; crossing borders, learning of caliche and wind, building monuments from mud, finding something of themselves, losing something of themselves. Few poets are as fiercely committed to preserving heritage and place. Luna—who now teaches at Metropolitan State College in Denver—doesn’t wander far from her origins, but she doesn’t need to in order to appreciate a complex worldview. Coupled with a meticulous attention to detail, this focus makes Pity the Drowned Horses a triumphant debut and worthy of keeping company with the classic titles of border literature. Luna proves herself a leader among the next generation of Chicano poets. MartГ-nez, Valerie.Each and Her. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010. The unsolved deaths and disappearances of young working-class women along the U.S.-Mexico border continue to occupy a solemn space in Chicano and Mexican culture. Outrage over the crimes inspires novels, films, paintings, and poetry—every artistic rendering an act against forgetting. The most recent creative response is Valerie MartГ-nez’s compelling book-length poemEach and Her. Though the single poem is composed of seventy-two compressed parts, few longer than a page, MartГ-nez covers an expansive terrain: the history of the tragedy, the social and economic factors contributing to the misogyny, the struggle for answers, Page 163 →and the atmosphere of danger that makes all women feel vulnerable. Each poem is like a brushstroke in an impressionistic portrait of womanhood within the reality of the troubling JuГЎrez murders. Part 43 reads, in the desert of Lote Bravo two teenage boys and their dogs follow a trail in scraps of women’s clothes

Because there is no single way to approach the enormity of the femicides, Each and Her gathers a community of sources that contribute to the unsettling story. Statistics and excerpts from media reports stand next to imagined scenarios (“after the late shift / on the maqui bus / we stitch ourselves / to one another”) and the relentless roll calls of the dead, including a gasp-inducing list of sixty-five identified victims named MarГ-a. And interspersed throughout the book, a more personal narrative rises to the surface: two young sisters growing up along the border under the watch of Malia, a domestic and an international commuter. Slowly, the innocent memories of childhood darken into the harsh reality of females as targets of violence and the need for women to remain linked to other women for protection: crush of the crowded JuГЎrez market Malia is first hand clutching mine Grandmother behind tethered to Mom Andrea RenГ©e grip so tight I think I feel my finger bones break The image of the chain of females offers a more positive contrast to the haunting sequence of murdered women’s names. MartГ-nez works hard in the end to shed some hope on an otherwise bleak state of siege along the border. Perhaps that is why she claims a new symbol of strength and femininity that must Page 164 →replace the rose, a persistent clichГ© that has kept the woman encased within a delicate flower, with the image in a famous Graciela Iturbide photograph: Nuestra SeГ±ora de las Iguanas wears a crown of many large, live iguanas—steely gaze—maternal considerable roundnessВ .В .В . Creator GodsВ .В .В . they represent the repeated attempt—after many failures—to remake the world. Each and Her represents an incredible poetic feat: piecing together the complexity of an overwhelming social ill without erasing the dignity of each woman lost or generalizing the gravity of her individual, interrupted path. MelГ©ndez, MarГ-a.How Long She’ll Last in This World. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006. “Places and pasts are simultaneous places and times in the open mind,” writes MarГ-a MelГ©ndez in her poetry collection How Long She’ll Last in This World. That statement resonates as each poem leaps into a different territory (motherhood, ecology, mythology, pop culture), creating an expansive—and impressive—map of contemplations that rise to celebration or plunge into lament. The dominant landscape in MelГ©ndez’s work is the natural environment, a presence that instills awe.

Indeed, the spiritual heights are not the heavens, but the godlike mountains, and the wealth of life surrounding them must be venerated to make love live: on the tops of hippos’ ever-growing teeth, and in the osprey’s perfect talon-open moment before splashdown, in the monkey’s soft hair, and in the four toes on a gray wolf’s hidden print. Page 165 →From “the tiny pink blooms of alpine Campanela” to the Sierra Madre, where the wolf spirit roams “solid as granite, forged in fire,” the ecosystem is a dimension of beauty. And the human, just another mammal on the range and the most domineering of earthly creatures, has the great power of destruction, but also of damage control: The shattered world’s particulates fall everywhere around us; the call to prayer means bowing and facing them all. Hence the reason MelГ©ndez’s poems swing from moments of human grace, such as in the inspiring poem “The Seven Gates of AztlГЎn,” to moments of disgrace, such as in the poem “Buckrail,” about the Matthew Shepard murder. But nature, too, has a temperament, as evidenced by the long poem “Controlled Burn,” which speaks to the fury of a prairie fire, and the shocking poem “In Biruté’s Camp,” about a rape by a simian. MelГ©ndez contends that violence and healing are base pairs in this dark but glorious age. Humanity and nature are its cohabitants. And so this challenge: “There is a time to grip your talismans, a time to strip yourself of them.” The speaker asks us to reconnect to “these places you never left” and recognize that “more lives move beside us than we know.” From these important gestures, the recovery of memory and spiritualecological health begins. With the notable list of mothers in this book (Mother Nature, Tonacacihuatl, La Llorona, and even the poet herself), readers might quickly classify How Long She’ll Last in This World as an exploration of nurturing. And although MelГ©ndez supplies plenty of food for thought, she has also written a call to action, a reprimand (not maternal), and an intelligent, inquisitive book about the large possibilities in small things: Maybe you can follow the orange-waisted ants into the tiny space left between living and dead; Page 166 →maybe what looks like a line of demarcation is actually an alcove,

a feast of hidden droplets— MarГ-a MelГ©ndez is a fine poet whose words ring with wisdom, discovery, and unparalleled beauty. Murrillo, John. Up Jump the Boogie. New York: Cypher Books, 2010. The differences between the East and West Coasts have fueled rivalries in music, sports, and even politics. And the differences between the African American and Chicano populations have resulted in mostly mutually exclusive social movements. But as a poet who identifies as “Afro-Chicano” and who has strong ties to cities on both U.S. coasts, John Murillo is a writer whose voice unifies disparate traditions and landscapes with the publication of Up Jump the Boogie. Perhaps the cultural event that best captures the energy and artistry of the crossroads where brown meets black is the historical boxing match between Roberto DurГЎn and Sugar Ray Leonard. For the speaker of “November 26, 1980,” this fight also embeds itself in his memory as the moment he discovers (among the all-male gathering of boxing fans) the joys and vulnerabilities of being a man. The awakening to the knowledge of another side of masculinity is at the heart of Up Jump the Boogie, since Murillo populates this book with compelling portraits of men with distinct differences and sensibilities: the Poet Laureate (an eccentric bard in search of an audience); Monster Boy (who suffers from a physical deformity); and Santayana, the Muralist, who “carries the soul / Of raza in his cans” and who “Aerosols AztlГЎn across barrio brick for all the poor / To see.” Murillo leaps from coast to coast, showing how men of many shades are worth celebrating even when they are devalued by greater society. “Men fresh from their cells” struggle to survive on “The Corner.” Their stories are not locked to geographical Page 167 →location but to class and the systems (prisons, rehab) that fail them. And so they find themselves back on the courtyard, lifting weights. Or back on cots, crumpling “Dear John” letters, slipping heads In and out of nooses. After years locked down, they all end up back here. The starting point for all these men, black, brown, in Los Angeles or New York, is the poverty of the neighborhood where the lines of the handball courts are “rubbed to nothing” and where “a crack in the earth cuts across the schoolyard, / Jagged as a scar on a choir boy’s cheek.” But for some youth, these troubled spaces are also the avenues toward expression in which music plays a pivotal role in the creative drive: The ghosts. The angels. Holocausts. The need To shake these shackles, field songs in our bones. As if, at twelve, we knew this, we named Our best moves free: to break and pop-lock, blood And bruises making rites. We’d gather, dance Ourselves electric, stomp and conjure storm, Old lightning in our limbs.

Near the conclusion of Up Jump the Boogie, Murillo weaves the communities of men (from family, friendships, and a literary education) into the stunning sequence “Flowers for Etheridge,” which serves as a statement of poetics and a statement of gratitude to the many guides who led him toward this powerful first book: Here is a hand held out to you, Etheridge, Poet to poet, man to exhausted man. Here is a day Set aside for communion, ancestry transcending blood. Here is my blood. Here is my history stretching for acres. Page 168 → SГЎenz, Benjamin Alire. Dreaming the End of War. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2006. Taking the art of protest poetry to a literary height, Benjamin Alire SГЎenz’s latest collection, Dreaming the End of War, is one part outcry and one part elegy. The combination forms an eloquent, touching song for these dark, conflict-ridden times. There is something biblical, perhaps even sermon like (but not preachy), in the way SГЎenz, an El Pasoan, structures his book into twelve dreams, each dream offering a unique and honest insight into society’s love affair with war. War is exclusively a male enterprise. Men become desensitized to violence through television, war invented for us, so we could begin to love guns and the Constitution and our rights to kill game for sport, killing, fathers and mothers approving because we were boys. This indoctrination makes it easier to enlist men for future battles, especially when it comes to fighting over land. The fuel is a misguided sense of patriotism and the government’s tapping into the territorial nature of men and their need for dominance. On this, too, the speaker has his say: I don’t believe a flag is important enough to kiss— or even burn. Some men would hate me enough to kill me if they read these words. SГЎenz also makes startling connections between the long-standing troubles of neighboring nations: Palestine and

Israel, North and South Vietnam, the Confederate States and the Union, and the United States and Mexico, where “we have been fighting a war on this border for hundreds of years,” so long Page 169 →now that peace seems elusive. And as history has demonstrated, certainly it is hard won, and bloody. The borderlands take on a special significance for the poet since these are the battlegrounds of his backyard, where prejudices against undocumented aliens abound and dangerous crossings cause fatalities. It’s enough to make him wonder “why anyone would risk death for a chance to live like us,” that is, Americans, the capitalist population that’s responsible for so much rage in the world today. “I am dying of all this knowledge,” bemoans the speaker, I am dying of thirst. I am a river that will never know water again. I am becoming dust. Though Dreaming the End of War is a book-length critique of humanity’s blood lust. “Have we fallen in love with apocalypse?” the poet asks, and readers, faced with the current reality of a prolonged conflict with Iraq, might answer with a resounding yes. But SГЎenz manages to toss a drop of hope, like an echoing coin down a well: Let me say this again. Again. Again. I want, I want this war to end. To end. Indeed, the poet will be heard. Again. And again. And Benjamin Alire SГЎenz merits a reading and a rereading because these beautiful, timely poems are both a powerful indictment against war and a heart-rending plea for peace.

Page 170 →

Juan Felipe Herrera’s Global Voice and Vision When the Library of Congress made the official announcement on June 10, 2015, that Juan Felipe Herrera had been selected the next poet laureate of the United States, the first Latino to hold the honorary post of “consultant in poetry” since the first appointment in 1937, the news went viral on social media and was met with universal praise. Though the prolific and popular Herrera is by no means an obscure candidate—he is also currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and his new and selected volume Half of the World in Light received the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award—there was something unexpectedly refreshing about his selection. The next poet laureate of the United States comes from an ethnic community that’s quickly changing the demographic of the nation. His voice speaks to the Chicano identity, the immigrant experience, and the struggle of the Latino artist. Though the current national climate is fraught with social anxieties and racial tensions that will undoubtedly become part of any presidential candidate’s platform, Herrera’s body of work amplifies a perspective that has been deliberately muted by mainstream media, or rather, clumped into a single talking point: immigration reform. Writing as an insider, as an activist who has journeyed through the second half of the twentieth century and into the present, he has remained clear-eyed and committed to his vision: chronicling the historical, cultural, and political landscape of his Chicano consciousness. In the following critical review, I highlight five of Herrera’s sixteen books of poetry, published by two of his loyal publishers, who also published the two selected volumes I have chosen not to include here but which I highly Page 171 →recommend, particularly for those who want an introduction to the scope of Herrera’s oeuvre. Those books are the aforementioned Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press, 2008) and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971–2007 (City Lights Books, 2007). I have written about these titles for other venues. The publication of Night Train to Tuxtla was significant for a number of reasons. First, it initiated what is now the most acclaimed Latino literary series in the country, Camino del Sol. Second, this was Herrera’s entrance into the university press system, whose wider distribution and print run expanded his readership and reputation. Up until this book, he had published a number of limited edition chapbooks and four full-length volumes with small and independent presses, where many ethnic writers find their first publishing homes. Yet Herrera, true to his generous nature, has been deliberate in acknowledging his gratitude for his modest beginnings. During his acceptance speech at the National Book Critics Circle awards ceremony, he singled out not only the work of the small presses but the local businesses and community centers that open up performance spaces to support poets and spoken-word artists. The sentiments of his speech mirrored the nostalgic tone in his introduction to Night Train to Tuxtla, which he titled “Train Notes.” In “Train Notes” Herrera includes a series of high-paced, high energy statements that not only contextualize his work but also introduce the reader to his rapid-fire, image-leaping aesthetic: “Previously, I had not taken the time to write on the swashbuckling Chicano sixties, an amorphous open-ended moment of creative and political gestation. Since I had spent the early seventies writing and performing political pieces ribboned with neat Amerindian utopian flourishes, I wanted to reenter, except this time with a more private palette, and unleash a Munch-Mariachi scream—a techno-urban culture gasp jammed up in the thorax. With Santana, I wanted to take on this challenge; let the congas and midnight beach waves come into the writing—lie down on a bed of hot dream rice stewed in salsa. Let Santana come with a dark spiraled guitar.” When Santana does come, he’s more than a soundtrack for Page 172 →Herrera’s sixties, he’s a kindred spirit. Santana, “vato from Tijuana,” had crossed the border and brought his unique sound, those “lead riffs for the band of spotted maracas and a fleet of ragged school buses under a cloud shifting into the shape of sugary skull.” Memory and culture as texture and lifeblood of the art is precisely what Herrera cultivates in his poems. The sixties was an important historical period of Chicano activism and identity formation, and Herrera addresses its literary component. “Rolling to Taos on an Aztec Mustang” pays homage to the pioneers of Chicano letters, at the time, like Herrera, struggling writers on a mission to spread verse through “tortilla-colored

newsletters” and to take poetry to the people with road trips throughout the American Southwest. The impressive roll call includes such luminaries as raГєlrsalinas, TomГЎs Rivera, Miguel MГ©ndez, Alurista, Teresa Palomo Acosta, and VerГіnica Cunningham, who was “coming out / with her sexual politics, ahead of all of us.” This poem in particular is an incredible record of grassroots literary activism. As one of the surviving members of this troupe, Herrera declares respectfully, “I remember all the names.” Herrera’s train, like his poetry, covers an expansive territory. He not only travels the Chicano Southwest, he also journeys to the Amerindian lands of Mexico and Latin America—an impulse of solidarity that he develops more fully in later works and that will be discussed later in this study. This train also moves forward in time to more recent events, like the LA riots of 1992 in “Rodney King, the Black Christ of Los Angeles and All Our White Sins,” in which he connects the plights of African Americans and Latinos: “this is the way of the black cross, / the brown crown of thorns.” But for Herrera, the connection runs even deeper, a shared history of struggle that resonates throughout the Americas and that continues to inform present conflicts, but also imagination. This awareness creates the sense of understanding something greater than the tiny space the body occupies: I can see everything—San Francisco, Guadalajara, and the city which was an empire once upon a time. I used to go there as a kid and look at my hands to make sure Page 173 →I was there— to remember myself there by the shape of my hands. This is the way of the Gods in the Streets, this is the Gospel of Rodney King, the Black and Brown Wand of Inspiration. That something greater is political consciousness, wide-ranging and inclusive, which Herrera continues to cultivate in subsequent books. In Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream, Herrera’s obsessive use of anaphora is incantatory, a litany of pain bearing witness to the blood wheels—repetitive labor, ubiquitous exploitation, the trappings of the American dream ever tumbling through the desert borderlands: Blood in the tin, in the coffee bean, in the maquila oraciГіn Blood in the language, in the wise text of the market sausage Blood in the border web, the penal colony shed, in the bilingual yard. And so the appropriate response comes mirroring that structure, except it represents prayer, accumulative strength, and unionizing momentum. From the poem “blood gang call”: Calling all tomato pickers, the ones wearing death frowns instead of jackets

Calling all orange & lemon carriers, come down the latter to this hole Calling all chile pepper sack humpers, you, yes, you the ones with a crucifix Calling all garlic twisters caught in the winter spell of frozen sputum. For Herrera, the migrant farmworker narratives that unfold on the fields are not that far removed from the working-class narratives of urban spaces, not when there’s a shared history and ancestry, indeed, bloodlines. And so these populations inhabit the same poetic landscape of the book. The opening Page 174 →poem, “punk half panther,” introduces a streetwise barrio vato, jute-boy, and trickster wearing a “CholoMillennium liberation jacket.” It is he who serves as speaker/guide “over the Mpire, the once-Mpire, carcass / neural desires for the Nothing.” He is Dante’s Beatrice in “steel-toe, bordercrosser boots” come to show us purgatory and its hells. The cities have their own citizens in “red striped despair pajamas,” who succumb to the temptations of alcohol and drugs, sex and money—the twisted American dream. Somehow there’s a lesser chance of escape for the city folk, perhaps because, unlike the farmworkers, desires in the city speak to personal pleasures and gains. From “gestapo bowls on the plank”: Inside my head, America the bead drops & rolls a tiny awakening. To transform, to reorganize the septum of Slave. Haaa-haa, I lied. Imagining a world disintegrating in stasis is a warning, an urgent message that’s underscored by the challenging performance piece (which Herrera calls a “canto”) that makes up the bulk of Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream, “broadway indian.” The speaker encounters the WixГЎrika, “the people, ” a term used by the Huichol community in north central Mexico. The flight of its youth to the north has threatened the people’s culture, history, and memory. The WixГЎrika, and indeed all of Mexico’s indigenous communities, are being forced into assimilation through the economic dependency that benefits industries in Mexico (and the United States). There is no changing the course of events. There is no recovering what’s been lost. There is, however, securing what has yet to vanish by acknowledging that it exists and remembering what is gone by speaking to its new stage of being as legacy, history, and memory. There’s also reversing the destructive exodus figuratively: by reentering the creative space where stories (and poems) take shape, by writing the new narratives about migration, about loss, about the heartbreaking homecoming. Or as the Jute-boy would say, “Crawl up, baby, come on, keep on floatin’— / slidin’, always: for black journeys, always in holiness.” Page 175 →With Giraffe on Fire, Herrera ups the ante on the postmodern/performative elements of his verse, imagining a godlike watcher over the world’s troubled narratives—a shape-shifting deity that also becomes the poet’s muse: “This is my language. There are no codes. She sits there. In eclipse. In fission. Hiroshima, Iraq. The San Joaquin Valley. In leather rubies and grape pesticides. Alive and willing, still. She is traveling sideways, onto Desolation and Desire. Avenues, voyages ripped from CГЎdiz to CadГЎquez. Moors and Jews come to her.” The universe is intoxicated with negative energy. An exhausting history of war and conflict, borders and contested territories, has barbed wired the latitudes and longitudes and dotted the map with wounds, from Tlateloco to Tiananmen Square. The pleas for salvation and redemption become brittle and irrelevant in this apocalyptic era. Survival is in the act of dissolution and reinvention: We must crash through our faces

and discover the new opening. Eat the gold, chew the strings, digest until we are ribbons, reddish and jade green. Chinese and Vietnamese. Cambodian and Hmong villages in tuxedos. Manila and Northern Luzon where the Ilongot seek the words for the new revolution. Herrera does not deliver this arresting vision of the broken times without his characteristic intertextual wit. This new religion under which the oppressed populations unite for an epic overthrow of the dominant forces comes with its unique Trinity: La Frida (Kahlo), La Georgia (O’Keefe), and La Gertrude (Stein), and an “old Macehual sorcerer” named Zapata, “the commoner who lives out his days in the hidden vault below VelГЎsquez’s cave.” These spirit guides will help unlock the doors that lead to the next plane of existence, which will thrive on knowledge and peace. Herrera’s ode to the restructuring of the power dynamics is in direct dialogue with the beginning of the new millennium and Page 176 →with the surprising end to the Mexican ruling party’s seventy-one-year hold on its country’s government. The poem “Bull and Octopus (AdiГіs, Querido PRI)”—a version in Spanish is also included—calls out the ruling party’s corruptions (“I judge you here”) and celebrates its defeat at the hands of its voters (“I look at you / take you apart on your very own shore”). But true to Herrera’s respect for Amerindian mythology, Giraffe on Fire is also a reference to the notion of the Fifth World or Quinto Sol (Fifth Sun), which is the present age, whose impending completion (according to a number of sources, including the Mayan Calendar) will usher in a new cycle or rebirth. It is not the end of days but the days of reckoning. Giraffe on Fire asks the burning question: Who will work to shape the next world? Herrera’s bio in Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is very telling about the personal nature of this particular book. It reads, “Juan Felipe Herrera has been a dishwasher, photographer, arts director, teatrista, antropoetista, Aztec dancer, graphic artist, cartoonist, salsa sauce specialist, actor, video artist, and stand-up comedian.” And although he has used autobiographical material in his work before, this book takes on the form of a scrapbook filled with letters, journal entries, family photographs, snapshots of moments that read like photograph captions, a short screenplay, and of course poems, many favoring his favorite literary device, the anaphora. The tone is much more reflective and instructive—the speaker imparting lessons about his political and artistic journey thus far. And like any good scrapbook, the book creates a narrative about the protagonist’s life-long commitments, in this case (as suggested by the author’s bio): to work and activism. The work ethic Herrera traces to his working-class roots, which is why he returns to those impressionable childhood memories, particularly of the hard-working women in his family, like Abuelita Sofi, who not only made hundreds of buГ±uelos for the nuns across town, she would walk them there. But there’s also CuГ±ada Yoli, the sister-in-law and successful accountant whose hard-earned money is spent on the envy of the neighborhood, a top-of-the-line Camaro. And then there’s Mamita, who enriched the young speaker’s imagination with fables, riddles, and MexicanPage 177 → ballads but also broke his heart with stories “about begging for food, about washing clothes, waxing floors, and cooking for the rich on Mt. Franklin in El Paso.” While she is alive, Mamita polishes the lens to the writer’s artistic vision and worldview: “You are the paper, Гіyeme, Mamita, you are the words, you.” But then, after her death, the speaker declares, “I am that paper, I am those words now, the ink burns pyres in every cell.” Her life, her lessons, become legacy and life force. As he moves into a professional sphere in adulthood, Herrera shares snippets of journal entries and the poem

series “New York Angelic” that details the speaker’s encounters on the road as a working poet. At times the tone is wistful, as in “June Journals 6-7-88”: “Been thinking about Buffalo, an inmate at Soledad Prison where I teach a poetry workshop.” But mostly it’s the poet coming to terms with the unshakable feeling that as he moves into different literary spaces as a Chicano writer, he belongs and does not belong. The double-edged experience of becoming a working artist of color in the United States is more fully examined in the series of letters. “Undelivered Letter to VГ-ctor #1, Late November, 1996” provides an important context for the Chicano professional’s labor: We are the real thing, you tell me. Been breaking new ground for decades, inventing ourselves, a new set of categories, fresh art forms, an authentic discourse, we been hashing it out, without much to go on, except this fiery salsa fuel inside, we put on cultural centers on pennies, Teatro Chicano, Teatro Latino, lesbian ensembles, Latino gay performance, we did it with khakis and wino shoes, you name it, we’ve broken through the wall, against all odds, from frijoles to murales, from stealing sacks of chiles to reappropriating our language and sexualities. Now that’s American, carnal, you tell me. And indeed, throughout the book Herrera provides plenty of examples of those pioneering efforts that shaped the Chicano Movement’s literary momentum. From elementary classroom visits to guerrilla readings at rallies, from writing conferences across the border to floricantos on community colleges, the urgency of the mission was never compromised, and the value of Page 178 →Chicano history, identity, and politics was never diminished. In “June Journals 6-1-88” he recalls, “As Chicano artists, we have always pulled out our images, landscapes and symbols from the gut to the page, from the bile to the open forum; historias terribles of our people, our time; historical suffering in vitro.” The purpose of this form of literary activism is not only to assert visibility and voice but to empower the youth by instilling pride and awakening minds. The poem “Chican@ Literature 100” attempts to shake things up with a bit of old-fashioned tough love: “First of all, you are not going to find this stuff at the mall, in one of those flashy pendejada shops,” begins the lecture, and then concludes with “go back and find the seedvoices, the ones that raised you, the letters that arrived with your red-green spirit, the ancient songs way deep inside.” And to further underscore that message, Herrera’s agit-prop-theater-inspired “Hispanopoly: The Upwardly Mobile Identity Game Show” offers a hilarious take on identity politics with plenty of his trademark wordplay and interlingual puns. There’s a spirit of generosity in Herrera’s willingness to share the family albums and family stories that continue to inspire him, and that in turn have inspired many of his readers and members of his audience. But the other gift in Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is the behind-the-scenes look at the writer’s journey, a labor of love and duty, an artistic practice nurtured with a passion for the word and a deep respect for the values of his communities. “This is all you need,” Herrera tells us. “Breathe in, breathe out, this green wind makes you strong.” In his most recent book, Notes on the Assemblage, Herrera opens with a sobering look at the current violent landscape of the Americas. “Ayotzinapa” (one of a number of poems delivered in both Spanish and English) channels the collective voice of the forty-three missing students from Iguala, Mexico. Though presumed dead, their voices and cause have been amplified by the global outrage, and by the artistic responses (like this poem) to their story: “we died toward all the cities / in the world toward all the students and teachers in the world.” But there’s another travesty taking place within the United States, and Herrera, expressing solidarity with the plight of Page 179 →African American men, invokes the names of Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray (among others involved in high-profile incidents) in “We Are Remarkably Loud Not Masked,” a poem that acknowledges (like “Ayotzinapa”) the need to channel outrage and pain into social (and literary) activism:

“we weep & sing / as we write / as we mobilize & march / under the jubilant solar face.” He broadens the conversation in “Almost Livin’ Almost Dyin’” to engage not only the deaths of African American men at the hands of police officers but also the deaths of police officers in the line of duty. The climate of violence has become endemic to American society and begs to change before the entire country bleeds out: cry cry the candles by the last four trees still soaked in Michael Brown red and Officer Liu red and Officer Ramos red and Eric Garner whose last words were not words they were just breath askin’ for breath they were just burnin’ like me like we are all still burnin’ can you hear me Herrera’s pacifist sentiments surface throughout the collection, as assemblage indeed of moments that demand pause (from “The Soldier in the Empty Room”: “Come, the forest nymph said to the soldier, I’ll take your guns with so many names”), reflection (from “You Throw a Stone”: “those stones / what were they / where did they come from”), and ultimately, action (from “Poem by Poem,” which honors the nine victims of the church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina: “poem by // poem / we can end violence / everyday // after / every other day”). To provide additional tones in a book that’s weighty with charged subject matter, Herrera introduces poems that celebrate the lives of poets who have passed recently, including a barrio sonnet for Wanda Coleman, “word-caster of live coals of Watts and LA,” and tributes to Jack Gilbert, Jayne Cortez, Philip Levine, and the late Chicano pioneer JosГ© Montoya, whose lastingPage 180 → legacy (and beloved memory) is acknowledged affectionately with the phrase “forever a sweet forever / my brother.” And as a nod to his own artistic interests, Herrera pens a few ekphrastic poems inspired by the work of the late Puerto Rican abstract expressionist Olga Albizu and the Mexican painters Fulgencio Lazo and Alfredo ArreguГ-n, who now live in (and are influenced by) the Pacific Northwest, adding to Herrera’s contemplations on the immigrant artist’s journey. Herrera explores the synergetic relationship between painter and painting in “i do not know what a painting does”: what does it do that is my question it looks back I think that is why you paint you are waiting for the thing-in-itself to come back to you to greet you in its odd oblong stunted manner its elegance Respite from tumultuous reality is short-lived, however, as Herrera comes back to his frequent concerns, the embattled U.S.-Mexico border and international conflict. The poems “but i was the one who saw it (drone aftermath)” and “i am Kenji Goto” speak to the turmoil of the Middle East. The first opens with a visual representation of the text shattered into pieces, making language illegible, the initial moment of impact inaudible or inexplicable; the second pays tribute to Goto (and Haruna Yakawa), the two Japanese hostages who were beheaded by ISIS in Syria. In “borderbus” another kind of devastating narrative unfolds about the predicament of the undocumented worker, not from Mexico but from Central America, whose trek across the continent with the threat of detention or deportation constant is arguably riskier. In this situation, a pair of detainees attempt to strategize their survival

while riding a detention bus: if they are nothing (without nation), if they are no one (without identity), they might get treated less like animals or criminals. But one detainee comforts the other by pointing out that this surrender Page 181 →and setback is not their final truth, not after having shared the stories of their journeys, which have not reached their end. They are in fact everything “because we come from everything.” That small but significant gesture of empowerment that comes from acknowledging humanity and empathy changes the state of one detainee’s sense of isolation and the other’s sense of purpose. Perhaps that’s the ultimate lesson in Notes on the Assemblage, to shorten the distance to knowledge and awareness, to close the space between those who suffer and those who can respond to that suffering. Call it building community or call it healing, in Herrera’s books it is absolutely an essential responsibility because it generates, above all else, hope. Perhaps the poem “song out there” says it best: if i could sing you would hear me and i would tell you it’s gonna be alright it’s gonna be alright it’s gonna be alright it would be something like that can you turn around so i can look into your eyes just for once your eyes As a poet who makes impassioned connections from his Chicano subjectivity to his role as citizen of the AmГ©ricas to his participation as a global citizen, Herrera has written an exceptional body of work, a true testament to his unwavering convictions and respect for the power of language. He’s a consummate artist and activist who will bring a different energy and perspective to his duties as poet laureate of the United States, and that’s one more reason to celebrate this timely appointment. But what came before that appointment, and what will stand long after it has been completed, is Herrera’s expansive vision, his remarkable voice, and those spirited flourishes that make him an original in American letters. Page 182 → Works Cited Herrera, Juan Felipe. Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. Herrera, Juan Felipe. Giraffe on Fire. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. Herrera, Juan Felipe. Night Train to Tuxtla. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994. Herrera, Juan Felipe. Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002. Herrera, Juan Felipe. Notes on the Assemblage. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015.

Page 183 →

Critical Grace Notes Because I became an advocate for marginalized writers and a mentor to many young artists, I have had to give plenty of pep talks and motivational speeches over the years. So besides the academic essays and book reviews, I’ve made a deliberate choice to include a keynote address, a commencement address, and an acceptance speech, as well as a few reflective essays about my work. This is the section in which I give myself permission to discuss my writing process, my poetics, and my worldview. The personal narrative is usually kept separate from critical writing, but that notion has been challenged over the years by writers who affirm that intellectual content can partner with the emotional to create critical discourse. That was certainly my strategy when I put together my first book of essays, Red-Inked Retablos (2013). I believe it was Gloria AnzaldГєa who encouraged queer and feminist critics to write the self into the work in order to achieve “a whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes.” It’s a statement against rigid convention and standards that have been designed to mute identity, the antithesis of the mission behind the work of queer and feminist critics. I feel particularly blessed that I have been offered so many platforms to express my perspective and ideas, and that I have been able to publish most of those texts to provide further instruction or at least engagement. I don’t take this position of privilege lightly, since I know that many of my own literary ancestors and mentors were denied such opportunities, though that did not slow down their creative energies and sense of purpose. I am grateful for their example on how to be a good citizen in an industry that’s sometimes disinterested and indifferent. Without those queer writers, women writers, and writers of color leading the way, I’m not sure I would have envisioned such a productivePage 184 → and rewarding writing life for myself. They allowed me to imagine a role in the larger conversations about literature and culture. Over a dozen books later and I’m still talking, grateful that the audience continues to listen.

Page 185 →

The Activist Role of the Writer The queer Chicano writer Michael Nava said, “Invisibility is the precursor to persecution.” He made this statement in response to my question about his most recent novel, The City of Palaces (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), in which he essentially queers the Mexican Revolution by including protagonists who are discovering or expressing their homosexuality while the nation is in the midst of war. “Why,” I asked, “is it important to locate our queer bodies within the historical narrative?” Nava replied, “Of course we [the queer bodies] have always been part of that narrative. But we have not always been seen. This invisibility has damaged us. Invisibility is the precursor to persecution.” I hold that word—persecution—in my hand and it feels quite heavy. I say the word out loud and it leaves an odor in my breath because the sound echoes of those gasps I made when I first encountered those frightening images in the history books in which people were corralled, imprisoned, assaulted, murdered. In the contemporary period, these associations might sound a bit melodramatic, but they are certainly not out of reach because the queer body, despite such gains as hate crime legislation, continues to be a target for violence and discrimination. Just read the national headlines: not only are they filled with the welts of homophobic attacks on the singular queer body, they keep underscoring the active presence of institutional homophobia against the queer community. Now imagine the body of color with its complicated relationship to whiteness, to the gatekeeping laws of this country, to pop culture’s insistance on keeping it perpetually linked to social ills such as crime and poverty, which only serves to justify its vilification. Imagine that body as the Mexican body and you come across a very short bridge leading toward indictments such as Page 186 →“undocumented” and “illegal,” “foreign” and “invasive.” Like the queer body, the Mexican body is forcibly locked inside its objectification, inside a symbol that produces anxiety and invites hostility. Now imagine the queer body of color, the body that many of us inhabit, the body that’s layered with the aforementioned burdens. Such a body comes across as vulnerable, doubly burdened, twice as weak. Or so we’ve been told. Let me pause here and quickly reorient this perspective, or else I will slip into the fallacy of seeing the queer body of color—my body—from the same angle as those who would harm it. Such a view of myself, a view I have been constantly shown through the accusatory lenses of the media, of religion, of politics, only serves egregious purposes: to convince me of my own inferiority, to devalue and dehumanize me, to explain why I am bullied and ostracized, to lead me to expect to be bullied and ostracized. I’m reminded of a presentation I gave not too long ago, in which a young man in the audience asked me, quite earnestly, “Are we really making strides as queer people of color? Are we really gaining ground in this climate where we no one seems to be listening? What do you say to those of us who are losing hope?” My initial reaction was, to be quite honest, surprise at the pessimism of his language. Here was a young man no older than twenty-five, a gay Latino college student at a prestigious midwestern university, letting me know that, despite the many strides he had made, despite how much ground he had gained, he was still losing hope! It dawned on me suddenly that the question he was asking was much more a personal plight, that his journey had reached that moment of existential crisis—a kind of battle fatigue brought on when frustration and outrage overtake one’s sense of accomplishment and triumph. At that moment I knew exactly where he was coming from. I knew precisely who that young man was because I had been there once myself, before I learned to see myself through the eyes of my champions and to stop looking at myself through the eyes of my oppressors and detractors. I looked at this young man from the podium, careful not to come across as condescending or patronizing but very much aware of my role as emergency mentor. “I hear you,” I said to Page 187 →him. “And I see you. From where I stand I see plenty to be proud of and much to celebrate. But like you, I too have sat in the dark

rooms of despair. The key to heading into the light is to remember that it’s your allies, not your enemies, who stand within earshot. That you have come this far, not alone, but in good company. That there’s a rich history of struggle propelling you forward, not holding you back. And that there’s an entire library of evidence to the contrary: there is plenty of hope. If you want to access that hope, all you have to do is read.” My use of the word library was very deliberate. As an educated artist, as a writer and a thinker, I believe in the role of literature in shaping minds and shaping lives. But let me clarify from the get-go: I do not subscribe to the notion that books can or will educate those who are already barnacled to bigotry and prejudice. There has been too much time wasted and energy expended focusing on those who will not listen, whose hearts will not soften to empathy and compassion, whose eyes will refuse to recognize the dimensionality or complexity of those they scapegoat and delegitimize. Their function is simply to distract the rest of us from turning our attention to those who need us the most—the young, our future leaders, our future citizens, our future activists. Believe me, my life has become much less unpleasant since I stopped worrying about those who don’t want to hear me. I recall doing a radio interview once; my host asked, “What can you say to those parents who object to your gay-themed books? What can you say to the parents to help them open their minds and realize how important these types of books are?” I was genuinely surprised because as I wrote every single one of my books I never once had anyone’s parents in mind. So why start? I turned to my radio host and said, “The parents? I have nothing to say to parents. It’s their children I want to reach. It’s their children I’m writing for.” The minds and lives I want to help shape are those of the youth, young people who are currently navigating that precarious stage of life when doors seem so few and windows so small. Books not only expand our imaginations and the size of our world, but they show us how people like us exist, live, love, and thrive. That queer body, that body of color, that queer body of color—there it is, on the page, flawed, imperfect, and alive. Such Page 188 →a beautiful thing this connection between the reader and the book, when the reader connects to the protagonist and learns about agency, introspection, and conflict resolution. When the reader understands that the self is not alone even if it’s solitary, that the person is both an individual and part of a larger community, no matter how much of an outsider or outlier that person appears to be. What a gift to acknowledge that being different is not a reason to be afraid, or silent, or invisible, or even dead. That being different is the avenue of artistic expression for a person who is actively engaged with identity, family, community, society. Is this that frightening “gay agenda” we are constantly accused of pushing? Asking our young people to read, to observe, to imagine, and then configure for themselves who they are and where they want to be? At this point, instead of mining further for platitudes let me tell you instead a story about a young boy whose family, though loving, had inadvertently shamed him into the corner of the room because he was so feminine and they were so aware of this. It seemed that even his facial features gave him away. All the other boy faces in his family were pure muscle and bone, while his was so awkwardly doughy and rosy, a ripe plum in a bowl of potatoes. And if that wasn’t enough, when he walked into the room he brought along a pronounced lisp like a pink balloon. What other recourse for self-preservation but staying still and quiet, what other way to survive but by becoming a near absence in the house, an errant puddle near the wall that each day receded more and more? I might have disappeared completely. I might have vanished, stupidly thinking that this was a favor to my parents because no one, certainly not them, could want a son who preferred the tamer activities such as reading and drawing instead of collecting scars on my legs from unruly chases through the backyard brush. How many times had I been pushed outdoors to participate and how many times did I disappoint my father, particularly when instead of running I crouched over the grass to touch a dandelion with my fingertip. What my father didn’t see was how like that dandelion I felt—isolated and alone. What I didn’t see was how like that dandelion I truly was—expressive and unique.

Page 189 →For years, I continued to run away into books and my family learned to leave me alone, to appreciate, eventually, how out of the way I kept myself, especially during my adolescent years when the other teenagers were shocking the adults with their rebellious behaviors. I imagine the grown-ups believed that I was all right, just a bookworm who withdrew so far into himself he no longer needed to speak or be spoken to. The truth was, I was dying. The truth was, I was hoping to die. The world outside my books had no space for someone like me, but there was something about the worlds inside my books that was also keeping me out. Books offered me a welcomed reprieve, certainly, a temporary escape, no doubt, and for that I will be eternally grateful. But deep in my gut there was a yearning, a longing for that understanding about who I really was, and that I couldn’t locate on the page. I knew what I felt, but I couldn’t give it a name or a shape. It was a sensation, an appetite, a hunger. And since it didn’t exist, at least not outside the negative shadow of shame and ridicule, I didn’t want to exist either. How lost I felt, wandering through my adolescence, still a voracious reader but reconciled to my reality: that as time passed, the more secretive I became about my desires, the more removed I became from human contact. I didn’t even understand the language of home anymore: girlfriend? marriage? love? These were the future goals that were going to be imposed on me and I was scared that in due time these expectations would betray me. Once in a while, I would stumble into peripheral characters in the pages of a book, but their stories were so far out on the margins that it was like catching a knowing glance with another boy on the bus—just a fleeting recognition of our mutual silent suffering. In the age before the Internet, I had no access to information, and even if I did, where would I begin? What questions could I ask? What words could I possibly put together to give texture to this lengthy and painful pang of mine? So one day, I just decided to quit. I must have been thirteen. My depression became aggravated by the recent loss of both my parents. What future awaited me as an orphan with these strange crushes on other boys? If I couldn’t explain myself to my father, I knew it was completely hopeless to try to explain myself to my grandfather, whose notions of masculinity were even more Page 190 →archaic than Papi’s. Somehow I thought that my death wouldn’t even be noticed, or at least, not mourned the way my mother’s had been. I felt so insignificant, so irrelevant, like those effeminate characters I came across in books, whose mannerisms made them more caricature and less human. Like those clowns of the Mexican cinema—esos jotos, esos maricones—frail and shallow parodies of femininity that I grew to despise because I didn’t want to be associated with them. And yet how I envied them—walking through their neighborhoods so courageously tolerating the derision and scorn. But did I really want to live the rest of my life like that? I can’t tell you the one thing that saved me, though I can certainly tell you what almost killed me: It was the absence of the queer-positive body, the queer-positive body of color, in my consciousness. Even now, this many decades later, I can tell you that I don’t rely on television, though I’m grateful when a queer-positive celebrity gains national attention, most recently Michael Sam, the first openly gay player drafted into the NFL. But my goodness, what a backlash! All of a sudden I’m thrown back to the hateful and immature playgrounds I thought I had left behind in my past. More power to you, Michael Sam. We’ve got your back. My personal recovery, if you will, actually began in college, where I gained access to the literature that I never knew was published when I was still in high school. What a sense of relief it was to find out that there were names for these shelves: Chicano and LGBT. That writers like TomГЎs Rivera, Rudolfo Anaya, and JosГ© Antonio Villarreal were bearing witness as far back as the 1960s and 1970s about this difficult transition I was undergoing: finding a formative education outside of the home. That writers like CherrГ-e Moraga and Gloria AnzaldГєa were declaring I’m a Chicana! I’m a lesbian! I’m a feminist! I’m a radical woman of color! and you couldn’t get more out and proud than that. And there was more to come when I stumbled upon the gay Chicanos who were writing about the gay Chicano journeys—John Rechy, Arturo Islas, Michael Nava. With these bookshelves combined, a new dimension opened up before me in which personal experience, intellect, politics, and activism gave meaning and purpose to identity—my identity. There was my queer body of color all Page 191 →this time—at the center of the story, not in the margins. There was my queer body of color, with all its baggage and potential, and all its past and future, and its present tense so palpable and public, daring to fall in love, daring to risk heartbreak, daring to simply be itself because that’s what I was meant to be from the

moment I first became aware that my queer body of color was going to be my most precious home. I wanted to give this testimony to assure you that I’m not speaking in theory, that I’m not simply reporting from third-party hearsay or research. This journey is my life, and it’s personal, and it’s the reason I became a writer: to add to those bookshelves that not only shape lives, they save them. What more noble cause than that, than to save the lives of our youth? And perhaps I’m saving myself each time I complete a book and toss it out to the sea of readers like a life preserver. Someone will grab it—grab hold of me. Therein the crux of this essay and the reason why I chose this tone: as a queer body of color I have such a great responsibility. It has always been there, but now I must be more deliberate in my resolve to assert voice and visibility because of the troubled climate I live in. First, the queer community and the Chicano/Latino community are presently the most accosted groups in this country, and I belong to both of them. The queer body of color is the connecting tissue that can keep these groups from resisting solidarity because they believe their special interests are mutually exclusive. And, yes, first we must confront the racism in the queer movements and the sexism and homophobia of the Chicano/Latino movements, but that can take place only if we stitch a dialogue together instead of chanting and protesting as we march forward on parallel lines. One visceral example of such a conversation is taking place with the UnDocuQueers, young people who refuse to divide their loyalties and identities and instead foreground the intersection of class, immigrant status, ethnicity, and sexuality. By simply speaking from this nexus they reconfigure our perspectives, and suddenly there are new questions that demand more creative approaches and resolutions. Second, we are experiencing an era of transition. The demographics of this country’s ethnic population are shifting, tipping the cultural scales toward all things Latino. We are also experiencingPage 192 → our own backlash as demonstrated by the anti-immigrant policies that direct antagonism toward our communities, the pushback against the development of Chicano and Mexican American Studies programs, and the censoring of our literature from the public schools—all of these actions are designed to instigate fear about our expanding numbers and our growing strength. And in truth, these are nothing more than desperate measures that pretend to assert some semblance of dominance over our minds and bodies. Control over our culture and intellect is a losing fight. It’s kind of like all that Michael Sam hateration: the only arsenal that scared people have left is their stupidity and ignorance, and never in the history of the world have those weapons proven to be effective. At a recent lecture on Chicano poetics that I delivered at the Library of Congress, I jokingly said during the Q & A that in the end it really didn’t matter what any of us in the room really thought about Chicano poetry—the power belongs to the poets themselves, because it is their voices, their imaginations, their words that will outlive us all. What matters is that we secure these books for our future generations, who will, without a doubt seek them out. What matters is what these future generations learn about us and about themselves. What matters is that the literature creates a bridge so that, in the future, there will be an understanding that the artistic and academic communities of times past contributed to their present health. As our Chicano/Latino community becomes amplified, we must recognize that we will bring with us our shortcomings. As much as I love and appreciate my people, I know that much of the damage inflicted upon me during my youth was committed by members of my own family, in my own house. And later, in my schools and on the streets of my neighborhoods. As the body of color becomes a majority, the queer body of color will remain a minority. Will this new majority group respond to its minority group the same way the current dominant group is responding to its queer population? I’d like to believe that our Latino brethren will know better, but knowing better doesn’t offer any guarantees. History has taught us that much. The only certainty I can offer about the future is that we will have one. And I can only hope that our books, artistry, and scholarshipPage 193 → containing our voices, perspectives, and knowledge will be there too. Although I’m a big believer in privileging the audience of the present, I would be deceiving myself if I didn’t admit that I do ponder how our works will resonate with audiences a generation from now and beyond. This is not arrogance or presumption. I know our works will have an audience because it is human instinct and curiosity that compels people to mine their histories, their memories, their pasts. We’re doing that now. Why

won’t the readership be doing that decades from today? What I’m saying is that we still have many minds to shape and many lives to save, today and tomorrow. We must think carefully about idealizing our own progress and becoming too comfortable with the notion that as the leadership of this country begins to reflect its demographics more accurately, we will be more enlightened than the current dominant group. I don’t know if this will be the case, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared. And that means that we simply continue to put our experiences and testimonies down in writing so that we are continually making sense of the world we live in, never letting anyone forget that the body of color, the queer body, the queer body of color was there bearing witness. We cannot assume that there will not be an effort in the future to erase us, and we cannot be erased if we’re tattooed on the literature, on the politics, on the culture. Let us not forget that dire warning: Invisibility is the precursor to persecution.

Page 194 →

The Writer’s Journey A Motivation Receiving a degree in creative writing is but a formality for those who don’t need a license to imagine, and I suspect that most readers coming into a creative writing program already know that because they have been practicing that skill most of their lives. Attending a creative writing program means they responded to the hunger to move among those who have unusual capacities for listening, thinking, and communicating—capacities that appear to be in short supply if one gazes too long at the current political and social climates. Thankfully, writers invest their energy elsewhere, interacting with landscapes that expand the reach of consciousness, that rescue the individual from self-centeredness and narcissism, that inspire, educate, entertain, and illuminate. What a noble act it is to participate in reading and writing, the humanizing endeavors: no place, no person, no emotion seems so alien that it cannot be engaged. For that alone they should all be receiving medals, not only graduate degrees. But I digress. The task at hand is not to tell writers about what they already know, but to speak as one artist to another, one citizen to another, all of us painfully aware of the challenges before us as we make our visions public, as we continue on our lifelong journey toward clarity, reason, and surprise. Writers encounter the following word time and time again: NEXT. As in, what are you writing next? Where are you going next? What’s next for you? I’ve always found that word—NEXT—to be quite dissatisfactory, perhaps a bit too presumptuous and self-congratulatory, as if whatever happened before met its end, its completion, and, sadly, its abandonment. It’s a convenient word employed to signal a shift in focus or direction, but it Page 195 →doesn’t do justice to the writing experience, which is more of a spherical process, not a horizontal or linear path. By this I mean that when the writer builds it is a kind of expansion: one stage or phase or period growing out of the others—the present project flourishing from the labor and learning that came before. Writers know how this works, because that’s how they shaped their education, and their personal library, and their network of friends—one history absorbed into other histories. But as a metaphor for the writer’s experience, it helps to understand the following, which is my advice to all writers about to leave the safety of the writing program and about to embark on their literary journeys on their own; it is the best advice that I received over the years, directly and indirectly, from my mentors in the classroom, on the stage, and on the page. Point one: There is never enough time to write, so don’t let time be the motivation that gets you going. This is a difficult concept to grasp because there’s this eyesore of a thing called a clock, and it inconveniently reminds us of other obligations, commitments, duties, schedules, deadlines—in brief, all the grotesque vocabulary that pulls the writer away from the desk. And yes, I understand, there is this thing called a life and making a living, and children, and significant others, and pets, and plants. All of those elements can continue to be part of your immediate world—you don’t have to get rid of anything or, God forbid, anyone—if you simply conceptualize your day as a space wide enough to fit everything and more. If other exigencies are always pushing the writing to the edges, then the message is that the writing isn’t important enough to keep within reach. The desire to write should not be fueled by whether or not you have time to do it or whether you can fit the writing into your daily routine. But if you treat writing as an urgency, as another being that needs to be nurtured and cared for—as a responsibility—you will not neglect it. It’s like that exchange I had with my brother: five years into his marriage and still childless, I asked, “Alex, I know this is a personal question but are you planning on having children?” And my brother answered, “Well, I want to wait until I can afford to have one.” Page 196 →I almost fell out of my chair. I said, “Alex, you idiot, you will never be able to afford children. That’s not why people have children—because they can afford to have them. They have children because they want children. Money doesn’t raise children, you do!”

Well, the same formula applies here: time doesn’t do the writing—you do. It’s not time you need, it’s the irrefutable urge, the irresistible want that’s going to get the work done. It’s not even inspiration—though that helps. Answer the question for yourself: do you really want to write? If the answer is yes, you will write. It’s quite simple, and quite doable, unless you allow this thing called time to get in the way. Time—rigid in its order and strict in its calculations—is a failure of the imagination, it’s the antithesis of the expansive territories of your inventiveness. If time controls you, you have not learned one of the most basic principles in prose and poetry: time is a tool, it is under your control. How you translate that control from the fictional into the practical depends on your individual situation, on your ability to discipline yourself and your surroundings. And I’m not going to sugarcoat it, that discipline sometimes means sacrifice—sleep, mostly. And sometimes that means the writing will take place slowly—and that’s all right, writing’s not a race. Recognizing that every single published author accomplished the feat of writing a book should be evidence enough to prove that no matter what the circumstance, writing is always possible: books were written during wars, during revolutions, during prison sentences—what’s stopping you? So, if you are not writing when I come up behind you, tell me that you don’t have any ink, tell me that you don’t have any paper—easy fixes, temporary setbacks—but don’t tell me that you don’t have any time. If you do, you’ve told me that something else holds the writing pen, and not your own hand. Point two: Although you are leaving your current environment, your workshops, your conversation partners over meals and drinks, your immediate social pressure to own up to your identity as a writer, you will not move into the next stage of your journey alone. I had to shake off that notion of the solitary writer because I confused it with loneliness—and with loneliness comes Page 197 →the self-perpetuating burden of isolation, and with isolation comes the sense of helplessness and, worse, the shame in wanting to seek guidance or longing for a pep talk when you’re really feeling the despair of writer’s block. Yes, I know that in order to write you have to distance yourself from other physical bodies, maybe even lock yourself in a room for extended periods—but herein the fallacy: removing yourself doesn’t mean you are shutting everything else out; on the contrary, you are shutting everything in with you. And that’s a good thing. Let me explain: Imagine yourself in your writing space: you clear your mind of distractions, you set before you the blank page or the blank screen. When the words or the images come, they are drawn from that extraordinary database called a brain. That database has been growing steadily over the years, fed by the writer’s interactions with other writers, other literatures, debates, lectures, public readings. The memory bank that stores the essential biography of your past is there with its rich and inaccurate transcripts, its fuzzy recollections, incomplete scenes—the rubble that you mine and put together again to the best of your ability. And then there are the voices—real and imagined, the testimonies of heartache and conflict, the unforgettable exchanges with parents, friends, lovers that shape the dialogue, and the useful criticisms of cohorts and mentors that trim and polish that dialogue. Do you see what I mean? You may be a single body at the desk, but there’s an entire population helping you cultivate your art. This is an important recognition because when the writing suddenly stops, or when the writing comes wearing its ugliest accessories, or when the writing becomes lifeless, insipid, tone-deaf, cluttered, unruly, or brittle, you have permission to ask for help. The myth of the lone writer is a dangerous one and it completely undermines the purpose of community, the function of your writing peers and mentors, who aren’t divorcing you just because you’re leaving the stomping grounds. Preserve those connections, and don’t be shy about investing in an editor, if it comes to that. I’m frequently asked if I show my works in progress to other people. And I say yes—and I get wonderful results because I pay them. I don’t ask my writer friends because everyone has busy lives, and because I made the one mistake that I have regretted Page 198 →ever since: I didn’t stay in touch with my writing peers. It’s my loss, and it’s difficult to reclaim my place in a group that has supported and nurtured itself over the years. So I’m speaking from personal experience here: don’t burn your bridges, or it’s going to cost you—literally. My friends, however, are there when I really need them—and I appeal to them, confident that what I’m demonstrating is not weakness, but wisdom. To suffer in silence is stupidity. These relationships will not only help you with the crises on the page, they will help you through the crises off the page—and those crises will come, believe me. Which leads me to my final point.

Point three: Doubt is not an evil. Even more threatening than writer’s block is this unshakable suspicion that maybe you made a wrong turn somewhere—that maybe you’re not as talented as people said you were, that you can’t write anything as good as what you wrote a few years ago. Writers become defeated for the silliest of reasons: because they didn’t get published five minutes after graduation, because they didn’t become famous with the publication of that esoteric poem in that obscure literary journal, because they didn’t get a prize for pressing print. I’m devastated when I hear the irrational reasons for giving up. Something inside me dies when I come across those narratives, because that writer believes she is so special that she’s the only one who fought like a champion against insecurity and doubt, and lost. I’ve got news for you, sister: every writer, no matter how accomplished, how published or award-winning, struggles with doubt. The difference is that those who break through are also the ones who understand that doubt isn’t squatting in the corner of the room ready to pounce on you as soon as you let your guard down. Doubt is there to keep you honest—to keep you from telling yourself this is the best that you can do when in fact you can do better, to keep you from becoming lazy, cocky, clever, arrogant, blind—and I can go on and on but I think you catch my drift. Without doubt, you have overconfidence and sloppy writing. Notice that I’m connecting doubt to the work, not the writer, because doubt isn’t there to get personal. Those anxieties Page 199 →and esteem issues that sometimes creep up—it happens—that’s when you turn to your friends and mentors again, or better yet to the books that first inspired that dream that took hold of you to become a writer. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with summoning up your cheerleaders. But if you build a hostile relationship with doubt, you will have one less ally by your side. The key is to let doubt become a constructive mechanism, not an obstacle. I hope writers understand that these things I’m saying here are not meant to scare them; one of the characteristics I most appreciated from my mentors was their candor about what to expect from the writing life—it’s not easy, but it’s incredibly rewarding. It’s incredibly rewarding because of the patience, the labor, and the love that it takes to place one word next to another, one letter at a time. And from these arrangements the writer makes music, memory, and story—those necessary pleasures that tell us that, despite its afflictions, its sadness and brokenness, this life is still worth singing about. Not too long ago I walked around the streets of my beloved New York City to reflect on my forty-plus-year journey and to consider my many blessings. If there was one gift that I was most grateful for, it was this calling to be a writer. Not an easy conclusion, given that I was painfully aware that the world was falling apart around us, that I called myself an activist and yet I had spent most of my adult years not at the front lines but in front of the computer. And yet I understood something about this role, and I expect that the graduates of today and tomorrow will understand this also. Our task as writers is to be political in this way: by refusing to let the headlines define our time with its tragedies by underscoring the individual narratives of experience, observation, resilience, and imagination; by resisting the corruption and misrepresentation of collective terminology such as community, people, and popular opinion; by highlighting alternate perspectives, struggle, growth, enlightenment, compromise, and critical thought; by generating poems and stories that celebrate beauty and empower the scaffolding of language as an antidote to the jarring sound bites, the ugliness of two-dimensionality, Page 200 →and the destructive statements that divide, break apart, and demonize. I have always thought of writers as healers. Sometimes that means prodding the wounds first, so that others know there is something or someone that needs healing. In any case, the word is magical, isn’t it? Because it has the potential to speak to people we will never meet, in places we will never be, in times we will never see. What an incredible proposition, that whatever we set down on paper will outlive us, bearing witness to the very basic instinct: wanting to tell the tale—but in our own voices, so that whoever listens will know that the stories mattered, and so too the storytellers.

But mostly it’s because I have so much faith in the written word and in the writer that welcoming more writers into the circle is comforting—even if I don’t agree with what they have to say, I trust that it has been shaped with the intent to foster an invitation into their world, and not to force me to assimilate into it. In many ways I feel as if I have just preached to the choir, but the truth is we all need to come together once in a while to remind ourselves that we are not alone, that we are different and that difference doesn’t keep us from appreciating one another—a lesson that really does need to be taught more often in the world at large. It’s never superfluous to remind ourselves that as weavers, creators, and builders; as memory keepers and fabulists; as today’s practitioners of the language arts, our responsibility—your responsibility—is to keep literature relevant and purposeful, is to welcome others just as you were welcomed into complexity and possibility, so that our collective body of work can attest to those values we truly hold sacred: creativity and expression.

Page 201 →

Poetry Brings out the Mexican in Me I I identify as Chicano, a term that situates me, politically and geographically, within the borders of the United States. It’s a term I’ve learned to embrace since my days in college when I declared myself part of a community, a social movement, a legacy. The word gave me orientation when I needed it the most, when I realized I had moved out of my Mexican family’s home permanently. Chicano offered me a direction: it was forward thinking, it was progressive, and yet it often reached back to my Mexican roots because it valued memory, history, and story. As I moved on the professional path as a writer, I became more deliberate and vocal about declaring my identity as a Chicano. I was a Chicano writer. Though by this time I had also come out of the closet, so now I was a gay Chicano writer or a queer Latino writer, depending on context. To me these are more than labels or categories; they are commitments and responsibilities to my communities, and an acknowledgement of my journey so far. These choices don’t measure my distance away from my youth when I identified as a Mexican, they highlight my growing circle of associations, my ever-expanding family. I resist calling myself an American writer because to me it erases those exchanges and interactions that shaped me as a politicized citizen and an artist. It’s true, I’m an American writer, but more true is my loyalty to and recognition of my ethnicity and sexual orientation. I celebrate them by keeping them close to my name: Rigoberto GonzГЎlez, gay Chicano writer. If I uphold them as badges of honor, it’s because these identities—like all minority identities—tend to be devalued. To me, they are declarations of pride. Page 202 →Additionally, I’ve always found the adjective American problematic. American is of the Americas, a landmass that stretches from Canada’s Boothia Peninsula to Chilean Patagonia’s Cape Forward. But a patriotic fervor has co-opted the word to signify strictly a U.S. identity. And American patriotism has always come across to me as limned with xenophobic sentiment, which pushes against my other important identity: immigrant. II In a nutshell: I was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1970; my family returned to its homeland, MichoacГЎn, in 1972; we moved back to the United States in 1980; and my family returned to Mexico again, leaving me behind because I was enrolled in college, in 1992. I was a resident of MichoacГЎn only for a very brief period, but it was an important one in terms of shaping my consciousness about who I was in relation to the world: I was Mexican, I spoke Spanish, but I grew up learning about the North from dubbed television programs and in the evenings I heard entertaining stories about California from my father and Abuela, who had lived many years there. As a child I longed to have my own stories about the North, and eventually it would happen, since all the moving back and forth from one country to another was the GonzГЎlez way to survive. Our move North in 1980 wasn’t entirely unexpected, though that didn’t make it any easier to adjust. Growing up in Southern California, in a farmworking community, meant that all things Mexican and all things Spanish were at home. All things American, all things English were at school. This demarcation would have been troubling if it didn’t afford me a private world: at home, my American space was my homework and the many books I read; at school, my Mexican space was in my imagination—what else did I have to think or write about if it wasn’t stories about my family and Mexico? It was ironic to find myself longing for both when I had long anticipated, long looked forward to, life in the North. I suppose this bicultural, bilingual identity prepared me for my future as a Chicano, where such complexities in an upbringingPage 203 → were not unusual and were much appreciated as strengths in a person’s character. I realized this very quickly in social settings, when suddenly my peers would start comparing Abuela anecdotes and giggling at the similarities among our oddball Mexican fathers, our dysfunctional Mexican homes. It appears that

in college I was also nurturing the material that would eventually find its way into my writing, poetry in particular. Whenever I started to think about writing a poem, the process brought out the Mexican in me. III I’m frequently asked if my poems, written exclusively in English, are translated into Spanish. This question makes me bristle because it seems to imply that my work isn’t good enough in the language it’s already written in. In the past, I would simply say no, but apologetically, as if I had done something wrong. But now I simply state the truth: what for? My audience is an English-speaking, English-reading audience. And although I’m fluent in Spanish, I’m not reaching out to Spanish speakers. Or maybe I am, since I’m certain that part of my English-speaking, English-reading audience is also bilingual or multilingual or culturally versed in the Mexican/Chicano/Latino landscape I inhabit. In any case, English isn’t my imposed limitation. It’s my chosen tool to communicate, mostly because my literary education has been in English. The other question that irks me is when I’m asked if I code-switch or employ intralingual devices in my work. Again, no, and I probably never will. As I explained earlier, my family was very clear about keeping a border between the two languages. My grandfather especially would become furious if we peppered Spanish with English words. He considered it a corruption of the language, at best, at worst, a lack of education. My brother and I, of course, would code-switch in the privacy of our room, as a kind of defiance to Abuelo’s prejudices, but we knew this was a forced speech. It didn’t come naturally to us at all the way we heard it spoken in our neighborhoods, by our closest friends. In college I encountered the work of Alurista, Juan Felipe Page 204 →Herrera, Sandra Cisneros, and other poets who did code-switch, and I understood the work perfectly but could not imitate it without feeling like an impostor. It seemed I was, like Abuelo, very Mexican in my thinking that this was the language of the pochos, the American-born-and-raised Mexicans. Like them, I too was Chicano. But unlike me, they were not Mexican. IV I call So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks (1999), my first book, my love letter to Mexico. I began writing this book as my graduate school thesis in 1992, the year my entire family relocated to MichoacГЎn once again, leaving me in its adopted country all alone. I remember Abuela calling me on the phone to ask if I was going to pack my bags as well, and we both knew that I would stay, that I had another path to follow. That goodbye made me want to hold on to what appeared to be slipping through my fingers like sand. I remember that as soon as I hung up the phone I started writing things down, as if I was afraid of forgetting. I had done this once before, when I was ten, on our three-day bus ride from MichoacГЎn to the U.S.-Mexico border: I stared wideeyed out the window, taking it all in because I was losing it all, my country, my home, one small town at a time. Over the years, when I make appearances at college campuses, I have come to expect the question about this separation from family. A young man or woman, clearly homesick, identifying with me as the child of immigrants, comes up to me to inquire how I did it: how did I not simply pack my bags and go back home? Home? Home is the word and the work. As an artist, I understand that home is an imagined space and that I’m always imagining, therefore I’m never not home. But this is such an abstract and philosophical concept, and it took me years to believe it myself. Because, yes, there were long periods of loneliness and emptiness, short periods of second-guessing and regrets. So instead, I offer them my “string theory.” It’s an immigrant’s way of reconciling with the legacy of migration. I tell the anxious young person, “You need a piece of string Page 205 →and a map of the Americas. Now hold one end of the string on the place of the map that marks the beginning of your parents’s journey, where they come from. Now stretch the string to the place on the map where they set up a home or to where you were born. That’s the length of your parents’s journey, your parents who likely didn’t have the same opportunities and education that you have had so far. Now, how much are you going to add to that string if you don’t even dare leave home?”

The demonstration works every time, because these young people acquired a fear that their own parents didn’t have. Or rather, they forgot about a strength and courage that is their immigrant legacy. If my parents stretched that string from MichoacГЎn to California, I have stretched it from California to New York City. There were many temporary homes along the way, in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, and Illinois—my peripatetic nature mirrored my family’s, always moving on to the next job. But no matter where I was, when I sat down to write I inhabited the memory of Mexico. I recall at one point finishing my childhood memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, in Scotland. That’s the immigrant’s complexity: you leave home, yet you never leave home, or rather, the body leaves home, but home never leaves the body. There is a beautiful comfort in that, which doesn’t allow loneliness to settle in. V As a man in my forties, three decades removed from the homeland of my childhood, I’m feeling an insatiable nostalgia for home. That doesn’t mean I want to return to Mexico (I’ve been lucky enough to visit about every other year), but I do want to return to what reminds me of home—Spanish. It’s my first language, my first introduction to song, poetry, storytelling, and every other artistic discipline. And so I play the music of my elders, what I grew up listening to on the record player—Las Jilguerillas, Lola BeltrГЎn, and Abuela’s pirekuas sung in her native Tarasco tongue, PurГ©pecha. I read Neruda, GarcГ-a Lorca, and Vallejo in Spanish. I hold long conversations with my Spanish-speakingPage 206 → friends and family over the phone. No, I have not lost my language, but I have to make a concerted effort to engage with it. I don’t quite understand this desire, but I remember seeing it in my father and his brother when they were my age. They longed for what they had left behind in their youth as well and so they dug out all the archived posters and other memorabilia of their band, DinastГ-a, and displayed them prominently on the walls. The dates, 1973, 1974, so long ago, so far away on the small stages of MichoacГЎn. Perhaps this renewed appreciation is simply the body coming to terms with growing old. But I like to think of it as valuing what has not been forgotten, despite the distance of time and place. I don’t have the kinds of relics my father and uncle saved. Since I separated from my parents and my homeland at such a young age, whatever I’ve kept has been preserved only through memory and in my writing. Maybe that’s why Spanish has become more important now than it was in my twenties and thirties. I want to hear those memories, those words, in their native tongue. Maybe that’s why poetry, in particular, demands to be Mexican in its inspiration. VI My most recent book of poetry, Unpeopled Eden (2013), is dedicated to my father and to my four-year-old nephew. My father died in Mexico, my nephew was born there and still lives there. The poems speak to the immigrant’s journey, sometimes painful and devastating. They also speak to the loss of fathers who migrate without their families, who abandon their families, who die far from their families and homelands. When I wrote the book, the shadow of my own father’s death loomed over me, as if I was working my way through the loss. Looking at my father’s decisions, his life journey, through the lens of conditions shaped by socioeconomic necessities, by political climates, allowed me to steer clear of personal accusations, of reducing my perception of him to a series of disappointments and heartbreaks. I included my nephew in the vision of the book as a way of inserting Page 207 →a glimmer of hope. There are some of us whose father comes back, the way my brother did, to his children. The more I read from that book, the more I’ve come to understand my own place in it, maybe in the world I live in. In many ways, I am like those fathers. I left Mexico and never went back. Is it not socioeconomic necessity that compelled me to stay behind in this country where I saw a future for myself as an educated man? Is it not political climate that informed my choice to gravitate toward spaces that welcomed my ethnicity, embraced my sexuality? As much as I claim Unpeopled Eden is about the immigrant, or my father, or those men who disappear, who perish, who dissolve into the horizon, it is perhaps the most autobiographical of my poetry books.

As I watch daylight fade into darkness, I am safe and comfortable in my little studio in Queens, New York. I don’t have to go anywhere if I don’t want to. But my mind does. It wanders and explores in ways my immigrant body can’t or doesn’t need to anymore. I’ve traveled to many places on the planet, but still I return to my beloved Mexican landscape, and to the stories that remind me that this is who we Mexicans—we migrant souls—are, curious about the next place, sentimental about the last one.

Page 208 →

Unpeopled Edens With each of my books I have become more interested in absence and silence, the painful evidence of loss. Unpeopled Eden explored this world through its ghosts. But I’d argue that their stories and therefore their lives continue to inhabit the spaces their bodies once occupied. I subscribe to the notion that land carries memory, so people are never truly gone, not with so many prints and impressions left behind. Our actions, positive and negative, become absorbed by the land. This is how we simultaneously nurture and poison the ground beneath our feet. The ground that interests me particularly is of the Americas, and more specifically of the U.S.-Mexico border. The Chicana theorist Gloria AnzaldГєa said it best in the opening chapter of Borderlands/La Frontera: The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the halfbreed, the half-dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal.” By the time I came across this passage in college, I had experienced life on the border firsthand but had never thought Page 209 →to articulate it or thought that it merited language. Or rather, I didn’t understand the border to be so complex because I could explain it to myself so simply. The border kept my people out and divided my family. Some of us had permission to cross it, others crossed it without permission. On a bad day the border was a burden. On a good one it was a gateway. But on any day it was an inconvenience, a stretch of suspicion, danger, and thirst. I had to uphold my family’s negative view of the border out of loyalty and out of guilt because I was one of the lucky ones who had been born in the United States, who could cross without the fear of reprisals from the gatekeepers. My mother never shook the constant threat of deportation because she was an undocumented alien. My father never overcame the anxiety of losing his wife in one of those immigration sweeps that descended on the packinghouse workers only when they went on strike. I recall those evenings at the small kitchen table with three chairs—the fourth was used to prop shut the broken refrigerator door. My father would come home drunk and my mother would cry and their grievances were expressed so openly that it embarrassed me. I’d close my eyes and question my mother’s decision to cross the border when she was pregnant with me. Maybe I should have been born in Mexico, not in California, and maybe that would have forced my father to quit drinking and stay home. Maybe there was a happiness we might have known, had my parents stayed in MichoacГЎn that spring of 1970 instead of heading north. What did we have here in the promised land but money troubles and heartaches? Those moments of sadness and the private sorrows of my parents followed me to the page when I began to imagine the landscape of the poems that would eventually compose So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks. I wasn’t compelled to write biographical poems about my parents—I wouldn’t be ready to write about their journeys until I began to write nonfiction many years later—but I did want to give my homesickness, my nostalgia, my memories different shapes and voices, so I created people who shared paths with my family and who, like my family, lived in that “third country” that AnzaldГєa spoke of, a country defined by hard labor. The border is a place where people work. And what created Page 210 →a demand for Mexican bodies in California was the agricultural business—the fruit and vegetable fields, the orchards, the groves, the packinghouses—they called upon the hands of Mexicans and blistered them, bloodied them, wore them down to

scar tissue. I remember those hands on my father, on my grandmother, and that might have been the fate of mine had I not been fortunate enough to find my way to college. I owed my escape, my luck, to generations of damaged hands. My responsibility was to honor their stories with paper and ink—the only tools I knew. The people in my poems work. They till the soil and harvest the land, but they also fix refrigerators, change bedsheets, pump gas, and sell trinkets on the streets. They’re the working class, very much aware of what they have and what they don’t. It is a class of hunger, desire, and want, and yet somehow there’s also room for life and light. AnzaldГєa calls this survival, perseverance, and hope. That’s the ugly beauty of the border: it keeps promising and we keep believing; it keeps calling and we keep answering. I declared So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks my love letter to Mexico and the border. I never worried about becoming sentimental in my verse because I witnessed too many teary scenes to name my experience happiness, let alone bliss. My family worked the gardens of Eden every day and every day broke into a sweat to prove it. Where did the body end and where did the land begin? The demarcation—the border—between the worker and the field was indistinguishable. This was a symbiotic relationship because one could not exist without the other and therefore one could not be imagined without the other. But there was nothing romantic about that bond since in the consciousness of the typical American both the agricultural fields and its laborers were invisible—a narrative that took place offstage. I became determined to bring that narrative back to the center so that my people could exercise their roles as protagonists. By the time I began to write Unpeopled Eden most of my family was already dead. My mother had died. So had my father. So had my grandparents. The border was still there but it had changed, certainly. It is in a constant state of transition. New stories were unfolding over the old ones. The living walked into ghosts. I felt a Page 211 →sense of urgency to look back once more and take a panoramic view of the border. I took in its expansive landmass but also its timelines, its history, its identity as home: the prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. This time I did engage biographical material, since I consider Unpeopled Eden an elegy to my father. My father left Mexico to escape poverty and he lived in poverty in the United States. He died poor. But I don’t consider his dream unfulfilled because I’m his namesake, his firstborn, and the heir to his journey. It is because of what he did and did not do that I became the person I am. And so I returned to the border to unpack my birthright as a bordercrosser, an outsider, a dreamer, a laborer, a dead man who left much evidence behind of having lived and loved. Writing those poems while living in New York City, I had to travel back twenty-eight hundred miles and twenty years. Once I arrived at the border I took another quantum leap back to 1948, to Los Gatos Canyon, the plane crash site that claimed the lives of twenty-eight deportees. I morphed into a Gila monster and spat out my haughty monologue. I kept a pillow book as I crossed the desert with a man I was secretly in love with. I visited the village of missing fathers and its terrible companion the village of missing sons. I took my place among ghosts and felt oddly at home. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half-dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal.” It was that word—queer—that welcomed me. I was a U.S. citizen, a college graduate, an academic—I had pursued the typical middle-class American journey so successfully that I had forfeited my place in my workingclass community. Except that in other ways I remained an outsider. As an artist. As a gay man. Queer. And none of my professional achievements had erased my Mexican identity, and certainly not the memories of poverty and struggle. I continued to be emotionally connected to the border. The visceral experience was still so palpable. I too had picked grapes, and onions, and green beans. The heat had burned right through my bones and I imagined them charred inside my body. I not only remembered sand, I could still taste it. The smell of sulfur was unforgettable. I had taken myself out Page 212 →of the border but the border had not taken itself out of me. All I had to do to access the landscape was to listen to my own body—the desert in my breath, the heat in my blood. And then there were the ghosts.

Ghosts are stubborn. They are the stories that want to be told again and again. They refuse to be ignored or overlooked and so they latch on to the physical world—to our clothing, to our kitchens, to our streets—everything that becomes part of a narrative. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. In Mexican culture, ghosts are evidence of the incomplete or the unresolved. Perhaps a task was left unfinished, a message was left unspoken, and so the yearning for closure outlasts the life and defies silence, absence, and death. They are another manifestation of the bordercrossers, the soldier of MictlГЎn (the opening poem in Unpeopled Eden)—the restless fugitives from the Valley of the Dead. I continue to be intrigued by this Otherworldly borderland, the place that houses, on the same plane, the living and the dead, the past and the present, the real and the imagined. Binaries are broken here, or rather, they meld together into a single stone. But what kind of emotional energy is being preserved there? As I look back at the portrait my poems have painted of the border I am slightly mortified by how I favored the deeper, darker hues on the palette. I offer no excuses, only more context: my mother left Mexico to escape poverty and she lived in poverty in the United States. She died poor. She began to die on very fertile and wealthy soil. My task now is to mine the inherent contradictions of such possibility, to build (write) something that provides perspective, that accepts complexity. What I write is not indictment; it’s response. In the last few years I have felt haunted by the three wounds of social injustice on the Americas: Ferguson, Iguala, and Ludlow. These troubled communities illustrate the volatile nature of racial and class borders—how the disenfranchised are subject to institutional oppression. Ferguson is a city in the state of Missouri, but its dynamic exists in many other American cities. Iguala, in which forty-three student protestors were kidnapped and killed, is a town in southern Mexico, but its tragedy is a familiar headline across the nation. And Ludlow, Colorado, in Page 213 →1914 was the site of the infamous slaughter of innocent women and children—the families of striking coal miners—perpetrated by the National Guard. The year 2014 was the centennial of the Ludlow Massacre. And 2014 was the year Ferguson and Iguala bled on the map. In each of these places, an abusive and corrupt power descended on the land to victimize its people. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. The Catholic in me imagines that the ground opened up and an evil ascended from all the toxicity that had been collecting there over the centuries. America is, let’s not forget, a continent of genocides. Currently, I’m envisioning my next book to be one poem about one land—the Americas. What comes after the singular unpeopled Eden is the plural—unpeopled Edens. I’m listening to the testimonies of the land, an expansive territory whose unpeopling happens again and again, whose inhabitants leave (or get pushed out), die (or get killed), and disappear (or are vanished), but whose energies, whose stories—whose ghosts—remain inextricably planted in the soil. Land is the most politicized of spaces—it is taken, it is stolen, it is dissected and eviscerated, it is bought and sold. It is always the casualty of the tug-and-pull between communities, religious and competing interests. It is the seed of many wars. When AnzaldГєa gave language to the dynamics and intricacies of the border, she brought with her a lifetime of personal experience, and lifetimes of memory, much of it from the land itself. The land spoke to her in the indigenous tongues, in English, in Spanish, in the coalition of all three. I suspect that my next project will also manifest itself that way. Just as one setting is not enough to express a continental narrative, one language is not enough to communicate that narrative. Besides AnzaldГєa, I’m also seeking direction from Eduardo Galeano and Claudia Rankine, whose multivalent narratives (Open Veins in Latin America and Citizen: An American Lyric, respectively) piece together a shattered (and shattering) story, not exactly as an act of healing (though the books are quite sobering) but as an act of revealing. Revelation is akin to revolution—it dethrones silence, particularly the kind whose power is amplified when it remains unnamed, unchallenged, and undisturbed. Page 214 →I return now to my parents, to that fateful evening when they decided to cross the border so that I could be born on U.S. soil. Once, as we were driving back from a summer visit to my cousins in Mexicali, my father pointed out the little green house he had rented as a newlywed. The house seemed too small to be the site of such a life-changing decision. It was made smaller by the presence of a dwarf palm tree squatting next to a miniature window. I imagined my five-foot-two-inch father and my five-foot mother—an adolescent still—dreaming large inside their tiny temporary home. I regret never having asked how that conversation

unfolded. Who proposed it? And how? My father, always a comic, might have offered it up as a joke. And when my mother took that suggestion in her hands she shaped it into a viable option. Or maybe it had been my mother, frustrated with my father’s slow way of doing things, who gave breath to the idea, who convinced my father to go through this outrageous notion. Now that they are both dead there is no one left to ask, but the story continues to live inside that little green house, which still stands, last time I checked. I trust that over the years the occupants of that little green house have heard it, or sensed it, that youthful courage. No, my parents are not the ghosts in that little green house, their energy is. Once, as my brother and I were driving back from Mexicali, I asked him to pull over so that we could see the little green house close up. Music was playing from a radio inside and a feminine voice sang along off-key. “Are you going to knock?” my brother asked, incredulously. I resisted the urge. Instead I simply placed my hand against the wooden door as if to verify the sanctity of this mythic place. But I felt nothing. I don’t know what I was expecting—an electric shock? a spiritual vision? Disappointed, I climbed back into the car and said to my brother, casually, “That’s my first home.” But even the truth in that statement didn’t take hold until I saw the little green house begin to shrink in the sideview mirror. I had left something of my own energy there as well that many years ago as I moved inside my mother’s belly. Ask the little green house, which despite its apparent indifference, had acknowledged my touch. This was a certainty on the border, place of long memory, collection plate of story. A person might come through here and remain anonymous or invisible, but only to Page 215 →other humans. The land itself, it kept a perfect record, heralding each welcome and each goodbye. I had passed that little green house so many times it didn’t need to feel me to recognize who I was and who my parents had been and what the circumstances of our many crossings were. When the car hit a pothole on the neglected road the entire vehicle shook and the little green house in the mirror gave me a knowing wink. Works Cited AnzaldГєa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

Page 216 →

Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement Speech In the spirit of gratitude and generosity, I want to share with you something I have never before written about, something that will help contextualized why I do the many things I do, why I became the person I am. I lost both my parents by the age of fourteen, so I was taken in by my grandmother, a PurГ©pecha from Nahuatzen, MichoacГЎn, who knew how to write only two words. Her name: MarГ-a Carrillo. She was unusual for a traditional Mexican woman: she wouldn’t cook, she loved to play soccer and to arm wrestle. She was the most masculine woman I knew. And though she hugged me only once, I knew that in her own way she loved me. I suspected as much because during the years of my formal education she was my personal archive. Every certificate of achievement, every award or recognition, she would nail to the wall of her house. After the death of my grandfather, her partner for over fifty years, she distanced herself from the family, closing the doors to everyone, except for me. I didn’t quite understand this privilege, but I accepted it, and when I paid my annual visit she would tell me each time how glad she was that I had found my way. She said this because I too had distanced myself from the family—or rather, the family had distanced itself from me, because even though I was the only college graduate, even though I was the only male who didn’t end up in prison or in a gang or working the graveyard shift at the local gasoline station, I had committed the one unforgivable sin of being gay. For many years, I didn’t really care that I had lost my family, all but my brother, who still stands by me to this day. But at that time, I took great comfort in knowing that my grandmother, Page 217 →MarГ-a Carrillo, acknowledged me and the accomplishments of my youth. She reminded me that I had a story, a history, and a past. And then one day, my grandmother died. I was not told, I was not invited to her burial and was denied participation in the ceremony of communal grief. But my family took it a step further; they gathered everything with my name on it, and everything with my face on it, and they destroyed it—erasing every record that I had been alive, that I had done good deeds, that I had been a good boy. It was a cruel gesture that was meant to punish me, and for one moment I actually considered succumbing to that pain and ending this life that my own family did not value and did not want to know about. I sincerely believe that I would have done it, except that very wisely I had cultivated a new family. Not only with friends and teachers, but with literary mentors—the bookshelf was indeed my life raft. Not only did I recognize my fears and my desires in those pages, I learned to appreciate them because they showed me I was just as human as anyone else, a person of this planet and not so much the alien I had been treated as, subject to ridicule and disdain. If I had longed for comfort, for words of consolation, I discovered them in print—which is why I thank my luck that I was able to find those gifts because I was a reader, and because there were these magical beings called writers who placed their imaginations, experiences, and observations in these accessible places, these amazing documents within reach. (So thank you, librarian, and thank you, bookseller, and thank you, teacher, for making those connections happen.) How far away I felt all those years, isolated in my strange emotions. What a relief to know that I was on a shared journey—not an easy one, but not an impossible one either—and that this body I inhabited had an identity, that this identity had a community, and that this community was going to instruct me, not damage me, was going to protect me, not deny me, was going to supply me with those stories, that history, and that past that had been stolen from me. Each word was a piece I was putting back together to make myself whole, and when one feels complete, one comes alive. It’s such a delicate coordination, isn’t it? In order to achieve this light you need a reader, a writer, and a meeting space: the book. Without that beacon I wouldn’t be standing before you Page 218 →tonight. I would have been suffering one terrible silence or another, an unsettling fate that I have pushed against all these years by being as productive and prolific as I could possibly be because, yes, my life depends on it. Books have taught me this: that I don’t have to stay in the world in which I was born, that I don’t have to live in the world I am told to accept, and that I can create the world I want to share with those I love—not only with those I know, but also with those I will never meet. So I thank you Publishing Triangle for awarding me the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, for

placing me in the company of many of those literary mentors who became a part of my family and who saved my life, and I thank you for expressing faith in my own ability to become such a mentor, such a resource, and such a contributor to the important cause of rescuing our youth from despair. And let me be completely honest: each time I write a book, I am also rescuing myself, because we are still navigating through very troubling times. Yes, we have cause to celebrate—our marriages, our role models, our literary figures, our leaders, our allies, our activists, our artists—but we have new challenges before us. And I speak not only as a queer man but as a man of color, a gay Chicano, watching my beloved communities assailed by policies that insist on erasure, censorship, and criminalization. It appears that the more visible we become the more of a threat we become—that queerness, race, and ethnicity and the bodies in which they intersect are held accountable for social anxieties that become amplified as distraction, making us appear more vulnerable than we really are. And that mind-fucking needs to stop. I don’t have the answer, but I do know that fresh creativity and perspective come to us when we engage our youth, our young thinkers and maturing writers, which is why it’s critical that we continue to nurture and mentor and listen, to share our opportunities, our stages, and our spotlights, and to read their work. I am so proud of our queer communities: we have done so much healing in this broken world, and it’s exciting to see where the visions, passions, and energies of the next generation will guide us in the coming years. The thought of combining efforts with this emerging intellectual and innovative cohort fills me with hope. It’s the same sentiment I believe my grandmother had when she Page 219 →looked upon me as a kindred spirit, when she turned away from the negative and surrounded herself with those pieces of paper with my name on it—each a page of evidence that there was a more beautiful narrative taking place and that she was complicit in its formation. And I’m convinced that she imagined rewards and respect for me that even I couldn’t foresee, and what a glorious thing to have someone wish you into a landscape so expansive and so cultured that you have no other choice but to be a model citizen and its ambassador. And so I end with that incredible woman who had such faith, who saw such possibility in her bookish gay grandson, her name the two words worth two worlds that sustain me still when this country allows one more bigot to speak. Let us be clear that the joke is on them because no television sound bite will ever drown out the miraculous chorus at the library. Yet it stings to hear that nonsense, doesn’t it? And when it does that’s when I need those two words that dissolve the bile on my tongue. My grandmother’s name has become my personal talisman because it tells me—not my former family, not my enemies, not my haters—it tells me that I’m here, I’m alive, and thriving. Thank you, MarГ-a Carrillo.

Page 220 →

Erotic Light, Amor Oscuro On the Queer Poetics of Francisco X. AlarcГіn and His Muse, Federico GarcГ-a Lorca In 1992, while I was a graduate student at the University of California–Davis, I crossed paths with a recent faculty hire in the Spanish department. I was enrolled in the MA program in English, but both departments were housed in the same building. I sought him out after a friend casually noted as he walked past us, “That’s the poet Francisco X. AlarcГіn. He’s from the Bay Area. He’s Chicano. He’s gay.” Eventually I concluded that this language building was the perfect metaphor for the work of Francisco X. AlarcГіn—the dynamic poet who introduced himself to the campus community with a standing-room-only presentation of his bilingual verse. I would come to appreciate and even look forward to the way he opened his readings, with the burning of sage and a ceremonial greeting of the spirits from the four cardinal directions. Tahuiiiiiiii! The audience chanted along with him. Francisco’s charisma and energy were unstoppable. Besides engaging his students in the classroom, he organized weekend field trips to Bay Area museums, set up poetry readings at an art gallery in nearby Sacramento, and even convinced a handful of us to read our clunky poems at the local radio station. We showed up dressed in our Sunday best and Francisco giggled as he said, “You realize you’re on radio, not television.” As a graduate student, I had connected with another important role model and mentor. Francisco was the first openly gay Chicano writer I had ever met. His stage performances were already legendary and his reputation as a poet in print was rising quickly: at the time he was being championed by Chronicle Page 221 →Books, which released Body in Flames/Cuerpo en llamas (1990) and Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation (1992). The second title, a book written in English, Spanish, and Nahuatl (Francisco’s grandmother’s tongue) garnered an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. But it was the release of De amor oscuro/Of Dark Love (Moving Parts Press, 1991), a series of homoerotic sonnets inspired by the Spanish poet Federico GarcГ-a Lorca, that finally gave me permission to reconcile my ethnicity with my sexuality on the page. For the uninitiated, Federico GarcГ-a Lorca was born in 1898 in southern Spain. Besides being an accomplished poet, he was also a noted playwright whose stage plays include such classics as Blood Wedding (1932) and The House of Bernarda Alba (1936). He is also the poet who gave world literature the theory of duende—the heightened state of emotion, expression, and authenticity, that deep song in the soul connected to flamenco and, through GarcГ-a Lorca’s exposition, to the poet’s song and soul. In 1936, when he was only thirty-eight years old, he was assassinated because of his political views and his reach as an intellectual by Nationalist forces at the start of the Spanish Civil War. The Nationalist leader was General Francisco Franco, who would come to rule Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975. And GarcГ-a Lorca would remain buried in an unmarked grave outside of Granada; his remains have yet to be found. When Francisco agreed to sit on my thesis committee, I began to consider seriously the term Chicano—something I had resisted because I had always called myself Mexican. I didn’t know I could inhabit all of these identities at once until I met Francisco, who embodied many of them. Like him, I had been born in the United States and spent my childhood in Mexico. Like him, I was bilingual, bicultural, and gay. And now we were both proudly Chicano. Our communication was infrequent for the next two decades, but we kept in touch through our books. I sent him copies of my poetry collections and he would report back with enthusiasm, letting me know about his projects. He was thrilled, for example, about his series of bilingual children’s picture books. He launched the “magical cycle of the seasons” with From the BellybuttonPage 222 → of the Moon and Other Summer Poems/Del ombligo de la luna y otros poemas de verano with Children’s Book Press in 2001. Three more books completed the series, all illustrated by Maya Christina GonzГЎlez, earning him two Pura BelprГ© Honor

recognitions. I recall thinking what a perfect match Francisco was for children’s verse. He had mastered the art of the compressed line and the use of accessible language, which was deceptively simple. But in fact his poetry flourished with imagery and music. His craftsmanship was deservedly acknowledged in 2002, when he received the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association. That same year the University of Arizona Press released From the Other Side of Night/Del otro lado de la noche: New and Selected Poems. I chose that title to inaugurate my book review column with the El Paso Times of Texas. In recent years, Francisco became invigorated by calls to action in light of the troubling developments in Arizona. He expressed his support of young people protesting the removal of ethnic literature from the high school curriculum and he rallied poets to respond to the contentious anti-immigrant law SB-1070. This last effort, which began as a social media movement on Facebook, resulted in a print anthology coedited with Odilia GalvГЎn RodrГ-guez.Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice was released earlier this year by the University of Arizona Press. It includes a foreword by the current poet laureate of the United States, Juan Felipe Herrera. The last time I spent quality time with Francisco was in May 2014. I was a keynote speaker at a conference at UCDavis, and Francisco, who always looked for opportunities for his students, got me to agree to a classroom visit and a reading in nearby Sacramento. In between these events we had lunch at a local Mexican restaurant. He handed me a copy of a manuscript, Borderless Butterflies: Earth Haikus and Other Poems/Mariposas sin fronteras: Haikus terrenales y otros poemas, which was scheduled for publication by Poetric Matrix Press later that year. A second manuscript, Canto hondo/Deep Song, was scheduled for publication by the University of Arizona Press in 2015. “You’re on fire, Francisco,” I quipped. “You’re a body in flames!” And he unleashed that unmistakable laugh of his that I hope never fades from my memory. Page 223 →That lunch generated a range of emotions. We were excited by the writing being produced by the next generation of Chicano/Latino writers and we were angered by the anti-Mexican sentiment taking root in American politics. We grieved the deaths of our fathers, we toasted the progress of LGBT legislation. And we couldn’t believe that twenty-two years after meeting for the first time we had come full circle in that small Central California town. “Thank you for everything, Francisco,” I said as we parted ways. And I like to believe that he understood what I meant by everything: for his exceptional example as a teacher, a writer, an activist, and a mentor. On January 15 of this year, after a brief battle with an aggressive cancer, Francisco, my mentor, passed away. As was expected, his contributions as a writer and activist were deservedly celebrated through tributes and remembrances on social media. But almost immediately I noticed the absence of one particular detail about his identity. His sexuality had become politely muted, sometimes erased altogether, as if his queerness had little to do with who he was as a person and an artist. I was particularly offended by this because on many occasions I got to meet Francisco’s partner of many years, Javier. How easily he too became invisible. I wrote my own remembrance, which is part of the passage I just read, to which I will add the following study, which situates his work, front and center, on the queer literary landscape. In his book of poetry published in 1990, Body in Flames/Cuerpo en llamas, Francisco X. AlarcГіn included the poem “El otro dГ-a me encontrГ© a GarcГ-a Lorca/The Other Day I Ran into GarcГ-a Lorca”: lo conocГpor el moГ±o los labios los ojos olivos

I recognized him by the slim bow tie his lips his eyes olive colored

lloraban

guitars

guitarras wept and y bailaba the afternoon Page 224 →flamenco danced la tarde flamenco de pronto se parГі vino

suddenly he stood walked

directo a mi mesa

directly to my table

y me plantГі un beso como sol andaluz el la boca

and planted a kiss like an Andalusian sun on my lips

At literary recitals, AlarcГіn would read that piece as a way of closing the first set of poems and opening the next one. “And from that kiss,” he’d say, “came this book: De amor oscuro/Of Dark Love.” And when he read the sonnets in the book published one year after Body in Flames/Cuerpo en llamas, they were understood through the homoerotic register he had suggested when he revealed his muse and that same-sex contact—that transference of queer energy that fueled his artistic creativity. Those two markers of identity—Chicano, gay—were important lifelines for me at a time when I was having trouble reconciling my sexuality with my ethnicity. These two spaces of existence seemed mutually exclusive, their political and cultural interests on different planes. In queer space, race was marginalized; in ethnic space, queerness was. If not entirely absent, the presence of one where the other was dominant was noticeably diminished—sidelined or included as an afterthought. What Francisco X. AlarcГіn represented was the manifestation of a conciliatory arena I had been longing for, in which the tensions between sexuality and ethnicity dialogued, in which their interests collaborated, in which one of my identities did not have to be muted for the other to speak. Excited by the possibility of having found a role model, I sought out AlarcГіn’s verse and immediately recognized its strategic sparseness: with the exception of his sonnets, his lines carried the weight of no more than three or four words. His vocabularyPage 225 → and syntax were simple and direct. He employed very little punctuation, no capitalization (except for proper nouns), and he wrote most of his poems in Spanish, though his books provided the English translations, usually by his friend Francisco AragГіn, whose translations I have included in today’s presentation. The simplicity of language did not denote simplicity of ideas. Indeed, the compression was deceptive, or rather, disarming. The expansive vision of his wisdom was delivered in a portable, quotable package. As example, the poem “RaГ-ces/Roots” from his debut collectionTattoo, which reads, mis raГ-ces I carry las cargo my roots siempre with me conmigo all the time enrolladas rolled up me sirven I use them de almohada as my pillow

There’s much to unpack in this seven-line poem, but to be succinct, it speaks to the immigrant’s story as much as it does to the notion of cultural heritage, it pronounces the curative or comforting powers of orientation—memory, family, community as antidote to displacement or dislocation—and it gestures toward the multiple planes of the speaker’s existence through the complexity of these roots that are permanently fixed and yet moveable. Tattoo was published in 1985, and as a debut collection it not only expressed Alarcón’s pride in his cultural background, it also acknowledged his queerness. The poem “Dialéctica del amor/Dialectics of love” spoke to another level of survival: visibility in the eyes of the beloved, acceptance, tenderness, and affection from another who, like the speaker, suffered the same plight of hostility and rejection: para el mundo

to the world

no somos nada we are nothing pero aquГ- juntosbut here together —tГє y yo— —you and I— somos el mundo are the world Page 226 →And on a more picaresque note, the poem “Eros” offers the following erotic tickle: no hay llave para tu puerta

there is no key for your door

solo only lengua a tongue para tu for your cerradura keyhole The second collection, Ya vas, carnal (published in 1989), delves into more political territory, such as the poem “Prófugo/Fugitive,” in which the speaker’s fugitive state is ambiguously insinuated. Is he a fugitive of the law? Does he live in the shadows because of his immigration status? That narrative remains plausible even after the final stanza unveils another possibility: he’s a fugitive from his true feelings of love for another man—it is necessarily a homosexual attraction because of how “criminal” it is to admit to it: he aprendido

I’ve learned

a disimular to fake casi todo nearly everything pero but todavГ-a still me delata when next to you junto a ti I’m given away el desbocado by the empty palpitar pounding de mi corazГіn of my heart The pounding of the heart at the end is both fear and excitement. The narratives interweave to demonstrate that the two seemingly disparate emotions can be experienced by the same body at the same time. And to underscore that this state of being is not a state of distress but a state of grace, AlarcГіn included the poem “Bienaventurados

/Blessed,” with the following stanza:

Page 227 →los exiliados blessed del amor the exiles los raros of love del espГ-ritu bienaventurados

the queer in spirit

In subsequent editions, the two languages appear on the same page—two vertical columns in a shared space, English and Spanish speaking in simultaneous broadcast like his Mexico and his United States, like his political voices, the Chicano and the queer. As I recall that exhilaration I felt at discovering an artist whose practice was intersectional poetics, I imagine this was the same euphoria AlarcГіn must have felt when he first learned about Sonetos del amor oscuro, the once suppressed poems by the Spanish poet. If there was any question about his sexuality, these eleven sonnets left no doubt that GarcГ-a Lorca was a kindred spirit, one of the tribe. The history of Sonetos del amor oscuro is an intriguing one. Shortly after GarcГ-a Lorca’s death in 1936, his papers were delivered to his father, JosГ© Rosales. Rosales stored the archive in a safe-deposit box in 1939, when he and his family fled to New York, where Rosales died in 1945. Six years later the family returned to Spain, and GarcГ-a Lorca’s brother, Francisco, took control of his brother’s papers. But it wasn’t until the late 1970s that he made the material available to scholars, with the goal of shaping a critical edition of GarcГ-a Lorca’s works. Sonetos del amor oscuro first came to light when two of those scholars, AndrГ© Belamich and Marie Lafranque, prepared a French edition of GarcГ-a Lorca’s complete works for publication in 1981. These previously unpublished sonnets did not escape the attention of GarcГ-a Lorca readers back in Spain, and then suddenly, under mysterious circumstances, pirated copies of those sonnets in the original Spanish began to circulate among queer literary circles particularly, under the title Sonetos del amor oscuro. Pressured by the growing curiosity about the sonnets, GarcГ-a Lorca’s family relented and allowed publication of them through the Sunday supplement of the newspaper ABC in 1984, but under the title Sonetos de amor, shying away from the unauthorized Page 228 →version’s title and the implications of that adjective oscuro. And though one conservative critic argued that the speaker’s gender was ambiguous, there was no turning back from what was considered a literary “outing,” a confirmation of a long-held truth. How else to read telling lines like the opening to “El amor duerme en el pecho del poeta/His Beloved Sleeps on the Breast of the Poet”: “TГє nunca entenderГ-as lo que te quiero, / porque duermes en mГ- y estГЎs dormido.” (You cannot ever know how much I love you / because you sleep in me, asleep to all.) In the Spanish language, where adjectives correspond to gender, the beloved’s male identity is not debatable and the speaker is not speaking from the point of view of a woman—it is “del poeta” not “de la poeta.” Shortly after the sonnets became public, AlarcГіn’s translator Francisco AragГіn, who was living in Spain at the time, began translating Sonetos de amor into English, and in the spirit of generosity, he sent copies of those sonnets to AlarcГіn. By coincidence, AlarcГіn had been working on a series of love sonnets of his own, modeled after Neruda, inspired by a short-lived love affair he had had with a migrant farmworker. The influence of GarcГ-a Lorca’s poems is evident in the title, De amor oscuro/Of Dark Love. The book’s epigraph prominently displays Federico GarcГ-a Lorca’s name along with the excerpt from the sonnet “El poeta pide a su amor que le escriba / The Poet Asks His Love to Write Him”: ВЎay voz secreta del amor oscuro! O secret voice of dark love! ВЎay balido sin lanas! ВЎay herida! O bleating without fleece! O wound! ВЎay aguja sin hiel, camelia hundida! O needle of gall, sunken camellia! ВЎay corriente sin mar, ciudad sin muro! O current without sea, city without walls!

The sonnets in De amor oscuro, like those in Sonetos del amor oscuro, speak to the aches of longing and desire, not to love forbidden by culture or society but to love denied by the separation from the beloved. Angst is generated not by homophobia but by the simple fact of the absence of the lover. This is not a tragedy, Page 229 →but it certainly is a drama. In other words, the darkness is not informed by clandestine meetings or exchanges in the shadows under cover of night, it is informed by the pangs of loss, of grief, of want, situating homosexual emotion outside of the judgmental light and critical eyes of religious doctrine and intolerant societal values. The tone in De amor oscuro/Of Dark Love eschews positioning the speaker as an oppressed queer figure. Indeed, he thrives in his freedom to unleash emotion, release expression. From “Soneto XIII/Sonnet XIII”: ay, cuerpo mГ-o, tan huГ©rfano de amoro body of mine, such an orphan of love cГіmo me duele haberte negado tanto, I’m haunted by everything I denied you, ahora quisiera besarte hasta el hueso

now I’d like to kiss you to the bone

I dare say that Sonetos del amor oscuro presented the gay Chicano poet with the permission to explore the intimate queer space as an expansive landscape in which the body negotiates its pain on more personal terms, away from the charged territories of censorship, shame, and retribution. Consider “Soneto III/Sonnet III,” which imagines the body as a refuge, sheltering the beloved—the home mirroring the sense of safety, relief, and gratitude of its inhabitant, giving new meaning to the term cohabitation: tu voz es un murmullo verde de oasis, yo he tenido tanta sed, tanto tiempo que ya no sé a qué saben las palabras frescas, amorosas, de manantial

your voice is the lush murmur of oasis I’ve been so thirsty so long, I’ve forgotten the taste of words— cool, tender, flowing from a spring

te escucho, abro las puertas, las ventanas I listen, open the doors, the windows de mi ser par en par, sin reservas, of my being without reserve, Page 230 →para que todos mis rincones gocen so that all my corners can enjoy la salud de tu voz como el aire the health of your voice like fresh air The similarities between GarcГ-a Lorca’s and AlarcГіn’s sonnets are not only thematic (same-sex love) and structural (two quatrains followed by two tercets), there are also tropes and echoes in imagery that bridge the two. GarcГ-a Lorca’s “Soneto de la ducle queja / Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint” and AlarcГіn’s “Soneto VI/Sonnet VI” imagine the beloved and the affection for him through the language of a natural landscape. I could stretch the politicized reading a bit and claim that through the invocation of nature the relationship is becoming rightly situated in what is natural, but the dynamics of the partnerships are in fact a bit more nuanced, if not provocatively placed within the sexual politics of role playing. From “Soneto de la dulce queja/Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint”: Tengo miedo de ser en esta orilla tronco sin ramas; y lo que mГЎs siento es no tener la flor, pulpa o arcilla para el gusano de mi sufrimiento.

I am afraid of being, on this shore, a branchless trunk, and what I most regret is having no flower, pulp, or clay for the worm of my despair.

Si tГє eres el tesoro oculto mГ-o, si eres mi cruz y mi dolor mojado si soy el perro de tu seГ±orГ-o, no me dejes pereder lo que he ganado y decora las ramas de tu rГ-o

If you are my hidden treasure, if you are my cross, my dampened pain, if I am a dog, and you alone my master, never let me lose what I have gained, and adorn the branches of your river

Page 231 →con hojas de mi otoГ±o enajenado. with leaves of my estranged Autumn. From “Soneto VI/Sonnet VI”: la noche se resbala por tus pГЎrpados tu respirar: vaivГ©n de olas de mar

night slips past your eyelids, your breath the swaying of the sea

en la cama te extiendes mansamente como un delfГ-n alojado en la playa

you stretch out so submissively on the bed like a dolphin beached on the shore

tu boca: boca de volcГЎn saciado, your mouth the mouth of a resting volcano, leГ±o perfumado, Вїen quГ© fuego ardes? o fragrant timber, what fire burns you? estГЎs tan cercas y a la vez, tan lejos you are so near, and yet so far mientras duermes como lirio a mi lado, yo me deshago, invoco a la luna: ahora soy el perro guardian de tu sueГ±o

as you doze like a lily at my side, I undo myself and invoke the moon: now I am this dog watching over your sleep

When the dog appears in the tercets, the speaker is indeed alluding toward the sense of loyalty for the beloved but also to a willing submission, gesturing to the dominant/submissive dynamic. In effect, this image is drawing not only from the familiar canine trope but also from the more mischievous queer parlance. For GarcГ-a Lorca, sexual desire is mostly expressed through nature imagery: the “branchless trunk” having no “flower, pulp, or clay / for the worm” of his despair, sweet complaint indeed. For AlarcГіn, describing the lover as submissive opens up that naughty door. How else to read “your mouth the mouth of a resting volcano, / o fragrant timber, what fire burns you”? The dog at the end allows AlarcГіn to echo GarcГ-a Lorca but also to revisit and unveil a more explicit reading in his predecessor’sPage 232 → sonnet. A second intersection of note is the use of the act of writing as an emotional conduit. In GarcГ-a Lorca’s sonnet “El poeta pide a su amor que le escriba/The Poet Asks His Love to Write Him,” the speaker as writer invites his beloved to become the writer, to participate in the act of written expression, which can become as sexual of an experience as the act of making love. The poetic description of the lovemaking celebrates the passion of sex and the desire for more, if only through language. What is named becomes real. What is acknowledged becomes complicity. Silence means the undisturbed peace of the dead, the sleep of loneliness. From “El poeta pide a su amor que le escriba/The Poet Asks His Love to Write Him”: Pero yo te sufrГ-; rasguГ© mis venas,But I suffered you, tore open my veins, tigre y paloma sobre tu cintura tiger and dove on your waist, en duelo de mordiscos y azucenas. caught in a duel of lilies and bites. Llena de palabras mi locura Fill, then, with words my madness, o dГ©jame vivir en mi serena or let me live in the serene noche del alma para siempre oscura. eternal dark night of the soul. In slight contrast, AlarcГіn’s “Soneto XI/Sonnet XI” moves from the act of writing to the act of loving—the poet overcome by the disruption of his concentration, language no longer able to capture the pleasure, or rather, the pleasure becoming its own landscape and language—his wish is to live those poems that can no longer be written. Page 233 →From “Soneto XI/Sonnet XI”: desde que escuchГ© el rumor de tu voz ever since I heard the rumor of your voice, las demГЎs palabras se me hacen huecas all other words ring hollow to me—

inГєtiles, estorbosas, hechizas

useless, cumbersome, bewitching

por eso ya no quiero escribir poemas sino vivirlos contigo: que sean brasas de un fuego fuera del lenguaje

this is why I no longer want to write poems but live them with you: embers blazing in a fire outside language

The distress of sexual craving expressed in both sonnets, and indeed throughout both books, is short-lived but angst inducing nonetheless—it comes to an end when the beloved wakes from sleep or comes back to bed. It is a precious moment of separation, perhaps a taste of what loss might feel like, and thus the emotional seizure becomes amplified, the glimpse into emptiness more frightening because its antithesis—fulfillment, satisfaction, happiness—is soul’s paradise. And if to inhabit love is to achieve heaven then to suffer from the want of it is most certainly hell. GarcГ-a Lorca made visible a space that he understood through his experience as a gay man—a courageous act of artistry that was way ahead of its time, but without it, contemporary gay poets would have one less literary ancestor. And AlarcГіn leaves behind De amor oscuro/Of Dark Love and other notable works that are now part of that queer literary canon that gay poets will access for motivation and inspiration. Since I first met him twentyfour years ago, I have done so many times. I am particularly fond of the poem “Oscura luz/Dark Light,” from Ya vas, carnal, which speaks to that struggle of how our identities are visible yet silenced, of how we are forced to privilege the comfort of others over our own self-care, and that what saves us is the knowledge of our true selves, of our potential, and of our ability to recognize and celebrate our inner strength: Page 234 →teГ±ida de noche my skin is dark tengo la piel as the night en este paГ-s in this country de mediodГ-a of noontime pero mГЎs oscura tengo el alma de tanta luz que llevo dentro

but my soul is even darker from all the light I carry inside

It’s disappointing that after his death, Francisco, like GarcГ-a Lorca, suffered the muting of his sexuality; perhaps the Americas in the new millennium, like Spain in the 1930s, still struggle with the complexities of sexual identity: we cannot see queerness through a positive lens without having to negotiate all the smudges that stereotypes, homophobia, fear, and anxiety left behind. But erasure, even if done through a sense of politeness or civility, is no less damaging. What should have happened, what should have been written, was a complete acknowledgement of the complete man—a writer, an activist, a gay Chicano. The poem above, I will read it one more time: teГ±ida de noche my skin is dark tengo la piel as the night en este paГ-s in this country de mediodГ-a of noontime pero mГЎs oscura but my soul tengo el alma is even darker de tanta luz from all the light que llevo dentro I carry inside Yes, inner strength, yes, our true selves, but to keep all the light inside—to have all the light forced back into the room, the closet—is also a type of death. I am reminded of Barbara Smith’s experience attending the

funeral of James Baldwin. “In those two hours of remembrance and praise,” she writes, “not a syllable was breathed that this wonderful brother, this writer, this warrior, was also gay, that his being gay was also integral to his magnificence.” And so I end with this appeal: when I die, talk about my work, Page 235 →talk about my activism, talk about how much I cared about my communities, but don’t silence the part of my identity that walked every single step along with me to the rally, the classroom, the desk, the podium, that part of my identity that makes me susceptible to hatred and fear and ignorance and hurt. That part of me I also appreciate and love, and so should you. Works Cited AlarcГіn, Francisco X. De amor oscuro/Of Dark Love. Trans. Francisco AragГіn. Santa Cruz, CA: Moving Parts Press, 1991. AlarcГіn, Francisco X. From the Other Side of Night/Del otro lado de la noche: New and Selected Poems. trans. Francisco AragГіn. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002. GarcГ-a Lorca, Federico. “Sonetos del Amor Oscuro/Sonnets of Dark Love.”Federico GarcГ-a Lorca: Selected Verse. Trans. John K. Walsh and Francisco AragГіn. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2004. 274–83. GarcГ-a Lorca, Federico.Sonetos del amor oscuro: RecopilaciГіn y reflexiones. Madrid: Colectivo ClГЎsicos LGBT, 2015. Smith, Barbara. The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.