Review Roundup--November 6, 2011

Publisher’s Weekly reviews Aracelis Girmay’s Kingdom Animalia (Boa, 2011).

Back in 2007 when Curbstone Press released Aracelis Girmay’s debut collection of poems, Teeth, Aracelis quickly established herself as brave and refreshing new voice in American poetry. Of Teeth, Martin Espada wrote: “In the title poem, Girmay describes a woman’s teeth as “bullets of ivory,” a fitting description for the poems in this collection: hard, cutting, brilliant, beautiful.” Bullets indeed. And in Kingdom Animalia Aracelis keeps on firing her bullets in celebration of life from the exact center of death and sadness. And this November 8^th at Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room, Aracelis Girmay along with Rosa Alcalá and Eduardo C. Corral will kick-off installment one of Letras Latinas’ multi-year reading series Latino/a Poetry Now—a collaborative initiative with the Poetry Society of America. 

Here is what Publishers Weekly had to say:

Girmay’s poem “Arroz Poetica,” from her 2007 collection Teeth (2007), continues to catalyze antiwar sentiment. This six-part book of verse ends with a short “Ars Poetica”—“May the poems be/ the snail’s trail.// Everywhere I go,/ every inch: quiet record// of the foot’s silver prayer./I lived once./ Thank you./ It was here”—that points up its simultaneous strengths and limitations. On the one hand, there’s nothing as clear and timely as “Arroz” here; it’s almost as if Girmay needed an entire book to write past it and back into a voice that can reflect her own life. On the other, the “foot’s silver prayer” of the “Ars” seems, in this collection, to take in a great deal of America and its global history. Girmay has Eritrean, Puerto Rican, and African-American roots; the section titled “a book of erased cities” brings a poignant, multifaceted sense of loss to poems like “Mississippi Burial, On the Ferry to Algiers”: “it is possible to wear your ghosts like a face,/ which is to say, my face has been here before.” So while there’s nothing as immediately gripping and galvanizing here, the book’s “snail’s trail” offers plenty for the patient.

The full review can be found here.

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Pansy Poetics reviews Rigoberto González’s Black Blossoms (Four Way Books, 2011)

In Other Fugitives and other Strangers (Tupelo Press, 2006) Rigoberto González presents us with a compelling recollection and a fierce homage to the lives of men and their sexuality and in his third collection of poetry Black Blossoms, González follows up Other Fugitives and Other Strangers by presenting us with a beauty of diametrical equivalence: Black Blossoms—a brave exploration into the lives of women of color and their journeys: A collection that I look forward to reading as Letras Latinas prepares to offer an interview with Rigoberto González who is slated to read at Macalester College in installment three of Latino/a Poetry Now.

Here is what Pansy Poetics had to say:

I believe the dead listen to us. After his poetic mentor, Ai, died, Rigoberto Gonzalez wrote quite movingly about her: "Even in my third book (which I dedicate to her memory) I can still detect traces of her influence--we shared a love for the dark and disturbing narratives and gave them homes on the page."

Never mawkish in his elegiac statements regarding Ai, Gonzalez has always appeared respectful and honorable. No doubt Ai appreciates his prose tributes, but I strongly believe what would matter most to her is the development of his poems. With Black Blossoms, his new collection, Gonzalez has performed the ultimate tribute: he has made his poems better than hers. I have no doubt she is still listening and learning from his work.

The full review can be read here. 

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Rigoberto González reviews Dagoberto Gilb’s Before the End, After the Beginning (Grove Press, 2011)

Rigoberto is not only an accomplished writer but also a generous and visionary man. As book reviewer for the El Paso Times, Rigoberto González has been hard at work promoting and enhancing the visibility and appreciation of Chicano/Latino writers for the last ten years. In his latest review Rigoberto writes of Dagoberto Gilb’s newest collection:

The lives of Chicano men caught in the struggle between the classes is the dominant theme of Dagoberto Gilb's resonant third collection of stories, "Before the End, After the Beginning" (Grove Press, $24 hardcover).

For the penny-pinching musician in "Cheap," what begins as an effort to save money on having a room painted turns out to be a battle with his conscience as he witnesses a contractor's exploitation of undocumented workers. The bilingual musician can speak to all parties involved, yet nobody's able to translate his good intentions when he makes kind gestures toward the Mexican workers and attempts to teach the Anglo boss that "you and me are lucky to be born on the rich side of the border." As a middle-class Chicano, he's perceived by all as a disengaged outsider.  

The full review can be read here. 

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William Archila’s The Art of Exile (Bilingual Review, 2009) is reviewed in Voices Education Project.

Yes this is an older review, but it is re-represented here with the conviction that the reposting of these critical reviews, in these Review Roundups, will lead to further appreciation and promotion of the work of Latino/a authors. And so it is the case with William Archila whose debut collection The Art of Exile takes its readers in a hallucinating journey into landscapes seldom explored by American readers: the violence of the Salvadorian civil war of the 1980s and its displacement of Central American immigrants who now claim the U.S. as home. And keep in mind the relevance of Archila’s work as he is slated to read at Georgetown University in installment two of Latino/a Poetry Now.

Here is what Renny Golden had to say:

In The Art of Exile William Archila's poems are hauntingly beautiful in their evocation of the loss of his country, of his Salvadoran friends, of a beloved father.  He risks language about those war years when He couldn’t bear all those open graves, / black mud, hyacinths falling apart. Archila was a child watching his country move inexorably toward the rising flood of terror when the

cemetery washed into the city.

Bones began to knock and knock at our door.

In a few years no one cared about turtles banging their heads against rocks…

parrots that kept diving into creeks,…

the dark swelling of the open ground


or at night the knife

Grief has a voice. It is why music follows him, always the music of those who, too, give sorrow language. Coltrane, Mingus, Duke Ellington cross the border, with him, sax and trombone, sad enough, undefeated, their language deep enough. But grief is not the last voice for this poet. As Yusef Komunyakaa states in the Forward, William Archila's poetry "does not serve as avenues of escape, but as mechanisms of confrontation, paths toward wholeness, always shying away from any kind of diminishment."  This book is a requiem, yes. There are memorials for friends lost: Memo, Henry, Chico and Luis. It is also a celebration of love, a refusal to let the dead be forgotten or anonymous: how soon we forget the red clay of men/ scooped out of the earth, the gods/ who spit down upon them. 

 The full review can be read here. 

--Lauro