Review Roundup: June 10, 2012

Kristin Dykstra reviews Urayoán Noel  

Kristin Dykstra of Jacket 2 reviews The Wind Shifts featured poet, Urayoán Noel. The review titled “On equal footing” is a review of Noel’s most recent works: Hi-Density Politics (BlazeVOX, 2010) and Kool Logic/La logica kool (Bilingual Press, 2005).  This multi-book review successfully condenses the defining aspects of Noel’s work: his double fluency, where Spanish and English “are on equal footing,” his playful take on language and traditional forms, his adept use of performance and his courageous tackling of the “stateless,” a place of flux in-between the U.S. and Puerto Rico as well as in-between textual forms (print, web, etc).

Here is what Kristin Dykstra had to say:

“The author of several books of poetry and translation, Urayoán Noel brings a satirical voice and a contemporary urban consciousness to the traditional notion that the poet will entertain and enlighten. The results, in his hands, are a well-done weird. Inevitably, they’re also compelling, and then a penny drops, and they provoke.”

                [Continue Reading.]                                                                      

*

J.D. Schraffenberger reviews Martín Espada’s The Trouble Ball (W.W. Norton and Company, 2011).

J.D. Schraffenberger of RAINTAXI reviews former-Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize judge, Martín Espada’s The Trouble Ball in a review for the Spring 2012, online-edition of RAINTAXI. Martín Espada, along with Luis Rodriguez, were the first “Latino/a” poets I encountered. I read both poets in high school, I still don’t remember how I came upon their work but the recognition I felt in their work and in their names was incredibly gratifying. 

Here is what J.D. Schraffenberher had to say:

“The title poem of Martín Espada’s The Trouble Ball is dedicated to the poet’s father, Frank Espada, who is pictured on the cover of the book as a young ballplayer in 1947, his leg kicked high, his arm reaching back with the ball mid-pitch, as though it’s the book itself he’s delivering, the poems in its pages meant to “trouble” something inside us. The poem recounts a trip Frank took as a child to Ebbets Field, where he expected to witness the pitching of the great Negro League player Satchel Paige: “¿Dónde están los negros? asked the boy. Where are the Negro players? / No los dejan, his father softly said. They don’t let them play here.” Among the intriguing and playfully named pitches Satchel Paige invented were “The Trouble Ball, / The Triple Curve, The Bat Dodger, The Midnight Creeper, The Slow Gin Fizz, / The Thoughtful Stuff,” this last pitch so called because it gave hitters something to think about as the ball crossed the plate. Over the course of his career as a poet and a poetic “troubler” of official narratives wherever they assert themselves too emphatically or unjustly, Espada’s stuff, like Paige’s, has been nothing if not thoughtful. Here he recognizes the national shame of racial segregation, but the poem does more than simply point out injustices of the past, filling in some historical blank or other; rather, it transforms the past so that “It is forever 1941,” and we’re asked as readers to try our hands at pitching, or catching, or taking our best swings at Trouble Balls of our own.”

[Continue Reading.]

*

Thelma T. Reyna reviews Lorna Dee Cervantes’ Emplumada (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981).

Another review ( a new one) of an older but classic work by Lorna Dee Cervantes. Lorna Dee Cervantes is of course another luminary of Latino/a letters, her influence on American letters extending now for over thirty years despite authoring only three poetry collections besides Emplumada. These are: From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (1991); DRIVE: The First Quartet (2006); and the most recent Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems (2011).

Here is what Thelma T. Reyna:

“Her poetry makes us weep in recognition. Or weep for the deep slashes to humanity that she lays bare in her unvarnished way, capturing the pain we often inflict on one another in unconscious or purposeful ways. Her book begins with one of the more powerful poems, “Uncle’s First Rabbit,” a compressed retelling of 50 years of misery. At the age of 10, Uncle is forced by his drunken, violent father to shoot, then bash to death, an innocent rabbit. The rabbit’s dying cries remind the child of the night his father kicked his pregnant mother till her aborted baby died, his tiny sister’s cries like the rabbit’s. Throughout his military years and his own marriage, the Uncle is haunted by his father’s abuse, and he can’t escape the “bastard’s…bloodline” within himself, a man tormented by demons who one night “awaken[s] to find himself slugging the bloodied face of his [own] wife.” The Uncle’s humanity gasps its last breath as he watches his dying wife in bed and thinks: “Die, you bitch. I’ll live to watch you die.”

                [Continue Reading.]

*

Nick Depascal reviews Fred Arroyo’s Western Avenue (University of Arizona Press, 2012).

Fred Arroyo, fiction writer and Letras Latinas Oral History Project interviewee, speaking (in this blog-post) of his novel The Region of Lost Names (Camino del Sol, 2008) and which chronicles the submerged stories of Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrants laboring at the Green Giant cannery in the region of Michiana—an intersection of sorts of northwestern Indiana and southern Michigan:

“I can remember as a child driving in a car out to Green Giant (I assume to pick-up my mother’s sister from work), and in the glass lobby being enchanted by the tall jolly Green Giant reaching to the ceiling, his body clothed in vines and leaves. As an adult, long after the cannery had closed, I would drive past and be filled with a loss in the face of those ruins. There were stories there—still lingering in the strong stench of manure from growing mushrooms that never went away—I wanted to listen to and write.”

Arroyo has followed that novel with a collection of short fiction which painfully and beautifully captures the immigrant work experience in the United States.

Here is what Depascal had to say:

“Throughout Western Avenue, the same characters reappear at different times and stages in their lives. Arroyo—an assistant professor of English at Drake University in Iowa—could have created a novel given the overlap, but couching these vignettes as stories rather than chapters in a novel allows him some freedom with chronology and development. Indeed, each of the recurring characters gets developed, some more than others. Since the stories are linked mostly by character and not causality, the reader is generally willing to give the author more leeway in the associative leaps between stories. Arroyo also gains the reader's good graces with his ability to swiftly develop characters in great and meaningful detail.”

                [Continue Reading.]

Review Roundup: May 20, 2012

Steve Fellner of Pansy Poetics Reviews Rigoberto González’s “Our Deportees”

In this particular review, Steve Fellner reviews not a whole collection of poems but rather a single poem by Latino/a Poetry Now featured poet, Rigoberto González: “Our Deportees,” which appears in the March/ April issue of The American Poetry Review. It's a poem that is also the title of this Harriet blog-post by Rigoberto González in which he explores the genesis of this poem and the many years that passed before finally writing it. Inspired by a Dolly Parton cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” a song about a plane wreck and the anonymous deaths of the farm-workers in that wreck, Rigoberto sought to write about the “spaces they [“the deportees”] vacate, leave empty, and are forced to occupy or abandon–the fields, the deportation bus, the detention center, the plane, the sky, the communal grave.”

Here is what Fellner had to say:

“The eerie thing about Rigoberto Gonzalez's poem "Our Deportees" in the current March/April issue of The American Poetry Review is the names of particular immigrants are almost never invoked.  There's one brief stanza about a common burial that lists some in the most cursory manner.  But that's it.  This is a poem that boldly refuses to use narrative in the conventional sense; we aren't given particular plights of particular victims.  The United States' treatment of illegal immigrants needs more attention than a litany of faceless entities, according to Gonzalez's poem.  By surveying the entire world --from a single apple tree to the path of a red-tailed hawk to strange flowers "with no petals" --he effectively illustrates how the entire fabric of the world is harmed through the persecution of immigrants.  Through Gonzalez's trademark of jam-packing stanzas with a particular figurative device--in this case, most often personification--he succeeds in creating what may be the best poem I've read in the last couple months.  Let's hope it doesn't get overlooked when the inclusions for Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize volumes are finalized.  Along with Jee Leong Koh, he was already robbed of a Lambda nomination.”

                [Continue Reading]

*

Lonita Cook Reviews Xánath Caraza’s Chapbook Corazón Pintado (Thorny Locust Press).

Xánath Caraza’s newly released chapbook Corazón Pintado is a beautiful collection of ekphrastic poems. These are poems of a rich diversity, poems inspired by artworks by Israel Nazario and Tom Weso, poems to the Copalillo tree, and to Yanga, the 17^th century African-rebel who gave the Spanish a royal trashing and established the first free colony of the Americas, today know as San Lorenzo de los Negros in Veracruz, Mexico. Oh and did I mention that 20% of the sales of Corazón Pintado will go to a Summer Art Camp for Latin@/Chican@ children? Also be on the look-out for Conjuro: Poem, a forthcoming title from Mammoth Press to be released in September of this year, it will be Xánath’s first book-length collection.

Here is what Cook had to say:

“Teeming with musicality, flavor, and color, each poem, presented in Spanish and again in English, is the literary interpretation of visual art pieces by Isreal Nazario and Tom Weso, images featured in the book.

While interpreting the art, Caraza maintains her signature style rich in Latino mythology, folklore, and history, spanning a multi-generational divide.  The voices of the past must dictate over her shoulder, their tales preserved, not by pen, but by memory.”

                [Continue Reading.]

*

Zach Hudson of New Poetry Review Reviews Javier O. Huerta’s American Copia: An Immigrant Epic (Arte Publico Press, 2012)

“I am going to the grocery store.” That was the line poet Javier O. Huerta was asked to write during his citizenship interview process. That simple line, years later, would become American Copia, Huerta’s second collection of poems. Using a vignette form, a play, and even text messaging, Huerta weaves together a poetic narrative that breaks the illusion that we live in a land of bountiful substance. Here, a mere trip to the grocery store unveils the political, cultural and economic nuances that unveil an alternative and painful reality: that despite living in what is perhaps the richest period of human history, there still remain those who live a hand-to-mouth existence.

Here is what Hudson had to say:

“According to the preface, Huerta promised the aforementioned immigration official that he would write an epic starting with the line “Today, I’m going to the grocery store,” and this book sets out to do that.  Grocery shopping is a major theme, and through it Huerta explores issues of class, culture, family and literature.  The book as a whole cuts back and forth between “American Copia” episodes, in which he collects short prose anecdotes based on grocery shopping, giving brief asynchronous flashes of his life and relationships, jumping between time and place.  Huerta sees shopping and food as windows into all sorts of experiences and issues—family and relationships weave throughout the scattered narrative.  One episode describes how Marisol, a pregnant Yale student, steals a shopping cart to keep next to her apartment, just in case it is the only way to get to the hospital when she goes into labor.  This observation, both humorous and serious, highlights the juxtaposition seen throughout much of the work—privilege and poverty, the lyrical and the mundane.”

                [Continue Reading.]

Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s The Strange House Testifies (Bilingual Review Press, 2009)

Back in November when installment one of Latino/a Poetry Now kicked-off with the Poetry Society of America’s second roundtable featuring Rosa Alcalá, Eduardo C. Corral, and Aracelis Girmay, I offered you this synopsis of that e-conversation.  I remember being deeply moved by Maria Melendez’s closing statements: Speaking on the issue of race and other barriers of exclusion that emerge in this discussion, Maria Melendez manages  to reaffirm her belief in the need for these three poets “to be more widely read, heard, and discussed” as an antidote to exclusion.

And now that installment two of Latino/a Poetry Now has concluded I find that Maria Melendez’s preoccupation with a lack appreciation and exposure to this new generation of poets showcased in this national reading series contributes to a form of censorship that is more silent but by no means less excluding than that of book banning. For example, in preparing for this e-conversation between Ruth Irupé Sanabria and William Archila, nowhere did I find a single book review or piece of literary criticism on Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s The Strange House Testifies.  In an attempt to breach this gap (even if it is just a little) I humbly offer you here my own book review of Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s The Strange House Testifies.

*

In her first book-length collection of poems, The Strange House Testifies (Bilingual Press, 2009) Ruth Irupé Sanabria explores the power of language to destroy and re-create. The book, while divided into three sections, reads as a two-part book. In the opening half of the collection Sanabria opens up with poems that explore the genocidal dictatorship that began in 1976 and which was responsible for the deaths and disappearances of thousands of Argentineans:

            It was the first reunion for MR. and Mrs. S—

            and their 4-year-old daughter

            since Argentine police arrested the parents

            at their home on Jan. 12, 1977

            and imprisoned them on

            unspecified charges.

            Mrs. S— commented that she had been kept

            in a 9-foot by 9-foot prison cell

            for almost three years and thousands

            like her are still in prison in Argentina.

            “Yesterday was the first time in three years

            I have been able to touch my daughter,” she said.

                        I vomited in the clouds

                        above the ocean

                        between Buenos Aires and New Orleans[…]

                        One stewardess gave me a hard American mint,

                        red and white, to suck on

                        and pinned a pair of plastic wings on my chest;   

                        said it was the shock of clouds

                        that had made me sick (6-7)

The poet’s juxtaposition of the language of official narratives, of Nunca Mas (the official report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared and which documents the human rights abuses), with the language of poetry offers not only a new insight into social justice but also into poetry itself. While a poem alone may do little to stop the historical, social and economic forces that create conditions of suffering for the innocent, these poems remind us that a literature that is deeply immersed with the problems of its times can only but aid in resisting through language—like here:

            When a family which was to be chupada, had children, the

            following methods were employed:

            1  The children were left with neighbors to be looked after[…]

            3  The children might themselves be abducted and eventually

                 adopted by a member of the armed forces […]

            6  They could be taken to the secret detention centre, where they

                 would witness the tortures inflicted on their parents, or they

                might themselves be tortured in front of their parents. Many of

                these children are now among the list of “disappeared.”

            Behold apricot chin,

            toddler nostrils,

            flared and boogered.

            And this one, glossy whites of eyes rolled,

            just a quarter moon of honey showing.

            Or here, sweetly milk-toothed and swinging on the walnut tree,

            and oblivious playing with blue toy blow-dryer

            in a box of brown sand. (17)

Or here:

            I would transform

            helicopters

  into seed

            and nectar loving

            birds colored lilac (74)

The second section follows the adventures of “ghetto girl” and explores—through poems infused with the music of Latinos and jazz and the everyday rhythms of African-American and Latino speech(s)—the racism and violence of growing up Latina in the U.S.: “I arrive unannounced” declares ghetto girl:

           trappin’ and slappin’

           your ignorance

 with my brown

 cape

this is no super joke[…]

and we’re coming

to a theater near you

to rescue

all the spics and niggas

stuck in naked freeze frames

big butt monkey sex scenes

illiterate dope dealin’ rice and beans

stereotypes

in

stereo sound (45)

And here too the poet dares to summon the hallucinating bird of poetic language, bird that has landed

          upon our rusted chain link fence

          has escaped

not only the cage

but complete ownership. (63)

Bird that “does not trust human hands” and sings a “wild-wing-growing” and shoots free through the roof of the earth.  

Review Roundup--March 11, 2012

Danielle Seller’s reviews Emma Trelles’ Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame, 2011)

This spring is a time of excitement here at Letras Latinas—not only are we anticipating William Archila’s and Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s launch of installment two of Latino/a Poetry Now at Georgetown University on March 20th  but also two readings by the winner of the 2010 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Emma Trelles. On March 18, Emma travels to Washington D.C. to read with DC-based poet Carmen Calatayud at the "Sunday Kind of Love" reading series at Busboys and Poets. 


On April 16th, Emma will be at Notre Dame, reading with Silvia Curbelo, the judge who selected her manuscript. With this in mind I offer here a book review of Tropicalia, albeit an older review it offers us a sneak-peak at Emma Trelles’ poetry before her readings.

Here is what Danielle Seller had to say:

With the publication of Tropicalia a new voice leaps onto the scene, one rejoicing in the often unsung qualities of Florida. In her first collection, winner of the 2010 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Emma Trelles seeks to make sense of the South Florida world she was born into, a world often gritty and hard to love, with its drugs and traffic and racism, but also one of exotic beauty. Unlike many who write about Florida, Trelles doesn’t rely on cheap exotic thrills to hook her readers. The poems in this collection are raw in their honesty and in what they are willing to divulge.

Click HERE for the full review.

*

Craig Santos Perez reviews Gabriel Gomez’s The Outer Bands (University of Notre Dame, 2007)

For those who may not be familiar with McKenna Hall—the building housing the Institute for Latino Studies—one of its most invaluable treasures is the Julian Samora Library. Where many of the institute’s historical primary sources (think the Letras Latinas Oral History Project which records conversations by many of the Latino/a poets, writers and artists we have come to love) are archived. Among these treasures is Gabriel Gomez’s The Outer Bands and which I had the pleasure of reading. If in times of natural catastrophe language is reduced to its most basic function: that of simple communication then individuals and society are essentially reduced to a state of muteness: “It is indescribable,” “beyond words,” these are only some of the clichés evoked to communicate the pain of catastrophe.  How then to summon a language to transcend this kind of violence? The answer may be found in Gabriel Gomez’s The Outer Bands. In this collection Gomez makes music of what is essentially an inaudible tragedy: the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  And in keeping up with the review roundup’s tradition of giving a second-life to older reviews (and taking advantage of the up-coming Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize reading) I offer you here Craig Santos Perez’s review of The Outer Bands, winning manuscript of the 2006 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize.

Here is what Santos Perez had to say:

Gabriel Gomez's The Outer Bands, winner of the 2006 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, inventively makes audible what is ultimately "inaudible for poetry" (5), from the transformations of glaciers to the vows of retablos, from the power of song to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.

Click HERE for the full review.

*

Nick Depascal reviews Sergio Troncoso’s From This Wicked Patch of Dust (University of Arizona Press, 2011)

A native of El Paso, Texas, Sergio Troncoso is the author of four books. His latest, the novel From This Wicked Patch of Dust was selected by Southwest Books of the Year as a “Notable Book” and by the editors of Dark Sky Magazine as one of the “Best Books of 2011.”

This is what Nick Depascal had to say:

Sergio Troncoso's new novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust, is a tightly focused and affecting work of fiction that has much to say about family, fidelity, religion and politics without ever seeming heavy-handed and pedantic. Troncoso's prose is crisp and clear, with nary a wasted word, and he manages to deftly handle numerous storylines over a long period of time in just 240 pages. While a couple of the characters' arcs are a bit less developed and less believable than the rest, the book is a highly engaging read.

Click HERE to read the full review.