Review Roundup: July 1st, 2012

Korinna Alvarez reviews Rigoberto González’s The Mariposa Club (Alyson Books, 2009).

Rigoberto González’s The Mariposa Club is currently reviewed at the Mixed Up Pollack. A work of juvenile fiction, The Mariposa Club, explores what is like to grow up a teenage queer in a community that refuses to accept and fears what it does not want to understand. Through the lens of “Fierce Foursome”— Maui, Trini, Lib and Isaac—the author paints for us a portrait of the courage of these “mariposas” to assert themselves in a society that refuses to accept anything that diverges from the norm. Rigoberto González—along with Lorena Duarte and Xochiqutzal Candelaria—will also be reading in installment three of Latino/a Poetry Now at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota on October 10, 2012

Here is what Korinna Alvarez had to say:

“At Caliente Valley High School, there isn’t much room to be different. Actually, in the entire city of Caliente Valley, the people do not seem too eager to change their ways like the rest of the world seems to be doing. This is why the Fierce Foursome—Maui, Trini, Lib and Isaac—find their way to express themselves in a variety of different ways. Rigoberto Gonzalez takes a deep look into what it’s like to be gay and seventeen in a community where this lifestyle is not easily accepted. Gonzalez shows how even though all four teens are gay and best friends, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going through the same hardships. The Fierce Foursome is a group of four boys with completely different personalities, yet who share the same understanding of their sexual preference and how their city views them.”

            [Continue Reading.]

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Aracelis Girmay’s Kingdom Animalia (Boa, 2011) reviewed in The Minnesota Review’s Creative Writing Blog

National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and Inaugural Latino/a Poetry Now featured poet, Aracelis Girmay’s latest collection of poems, (winner of the Isabella Gardner Award) Kingdom Animalia is one of those few books that make me want to read its poems out loud.  Her poems make me fall in love again with the act of writing and remind me why I became a writer myself. Don’t believe me? Read the following review…

From the Minnesota Review’s Creative Writing Blog;

“I am always looking for a poem to make me sigh, close my eyes, and whisper, “damn!” Kingdom Animalia earned 48 “damns!” for 48 poems; 53 if you count the five I said after I finished the collection.

Because “damn, damn, damn damn damn!” is all there is to say when you find a poet whose poems you’ve been waiting your whole life to read.”

            [Continue Reading.]

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K. Marrot reviews Richard Blanco’s Looking for The Gulf Motel (University of Pittsburg Press, 2012)

K. Marrot of Quarterly West reviews Richard Blanco’s newest collection of poems Looking for the Gulf Motel. Of the poems in this collection Rigoberto González said:[the poems] are bittersweet songs that ache with the ‘sweet and slow honey of a bolero.’ They croon about journeys from Cuba and Spain to Florida and Maine; mourn languages, lovers, and names that were or could have been.” Blanco’s latest work is a collection of highly crafted poems that offer a compelling meditation on how one family’s legacy has shaped and continues to shape a poet’s Latino identity, sexual identity and his understanding of the issues that make of life a rich and complex experience.

Here is what K. Marrot had to say:

I volunteered to review Richard Blanco’s latest work because I was familiar with his first collection, City of a Hundred Fires (1998). Though more than a decade has passed since I first read Blanco’s work, I’m happy to report that reading his new poems in a time so drastically different than those pre-9/11, halcyon days still evokes questions about identity as only Blanco can—impressively.

Blanco’s newest bundle, Looking for The Gulf Motel, marries memory, experience, and sometimes regret with “a pork roast reeking garlic” and “a pot of arroz-con-pollo.” I’m pleased to find that Blanco still creates characters whose memories are revealed as the inheritance of a first-person speaker. Blanco’s language, syntax, and characteristic form haven’t changed much; he deftly strings emotion and memory together like a Liguus shell necklace—like ornaments collected across the time line of a boy’s life. To his credit, Blanco’s crafty beachside memento needn’t fear TSA tussling during its return trip. No, his work isn’t fragile; it endures, conjures, and procures—that’s why I’m reading him again some fourteen years later.

            [Continue Reading.]

Diana Marie Delgado on Marie-Elizabeth Mali: A Book Review

Marie-Elizabeth Mali, Steady, My Gaze (Tebot Bach, 2011) paper, 80 pp., $15.00

          It has been said that perception is directly linked to the psychic motivation of the observer. In this regard the numerous references to God, both literal and indirect, in Marie-Elizabeth Mali’s debut, Steady, My Gaze, demonstrate the book’s commitment to a journey undertaken in order to better explore the limitless relationships one can have with God and the Self, and how these relationships intersect and interact.

      Broken into four sections, the full-circle narrative takes the reader through the speaker’s  concrete and metaphysical origins; the speaker’s Self in relation to a marriage; and finally, through a dialogue with the mind during a seven-day meditation retreat. The poem "Habrienta / Hungry", opens the book in Spanish and returns as the final poem, serving as a framing device whose double-mindedness haunts the entire book.

         In the first section, The Questions Themselves, we find the speaker defining herself through metaphors grounded in nature and religion: “I’m from seeking God like the last pear on the tree in October,” in the poem “Origins” and later in the poem “The Questions Themselves,” “Some days I’m my own private congregation.” This segment of poems demonstrates a longing to break, subvert, and reorganize the physical boundaries of identity: 

                                 Always the surprise when I step

                                 on a dance floor, salsa playing,

                                 side eyes thrown my way, tightened

                                 hold on their men, the why that white girl

                                 dance so good? My dance partner’s slow

                                 nod, his come on girl, show me what you got. 

                                            “Ain’t Nobody’s Business”

This poem, like many others, demonstrates Mali’s assertion that identity is important, even when transmogrified. And it is with this reverence toward the scrambling of Self (as I like to imagine it), that the speaker is liberated. What Mali then encourages is a Self that includes nature, religion, politics—the collective unconscious as expressed in all humanity. It takes confidence to do what Mali does; acknowledge that a speaker’s identity off the page often informs what does and doesn’t make it onto the page; that race, gender, and identity are important—

           Not surprisingly, most of the speaker’s formulations about the nature of God come in the form of inquiries. This strategy serves as a buffer, a way to take a critical stance against an entity without accepting direct ownership of it. The effect of this technique is to ask the reader or to lead the reader to ask, “Where is God, really?” and, later, in “What if God is the cat who bats prey about the room and grunts with pleasure” and then again in “The desire to please turned river of red: still God?” This technique, though apropos when dealing with multitudinous concepts, reflects little risk.  At the same time, however, the title poem, Steady, My Gaze, moves against this trajectory, embodying a straightforward approach that topples Mali’s neutrality and introduces the reader to a braver, more assertive voice.  This poem, ultimately, dissolves the aforementioned apprehension in that it serves as a material invitation to the Real, a time for absolution and truth:

                                                This female body, bound

                                                by want and hunt, rotting

                                                flophouse, movable casket.

                                                Bleeding, I run. A storm gathers.

                                                Lightning antlers to the sea, trees

                                                shudder leaves to the ground.

                                                I will lock racks with God.

                                                Find yourself another

                                                woman to wound.

                                                What man doesn’t wreck

                                                fights for each breath

                                                until God finishes the job.

            The following section, I Celebrate the Husband, portrays a self more firmly identified and ready to explore new beliefs. It details the quandary of a woman faced with the question of how to separate past violent experiences with men from her current relationship, a dilemma both vital to understand yet unquantifiable. In spite of the inherent difficulties, Mali manages, “to open myself to my husband I have to / remember he is not the man who raped me / nor the men who have tried.” It is this type of redirection of the mind that stands out in this collection—again and again. It is the poet’s maneuvering through surface thoughts and immediate feelings that ultimately allow her to establish a higher and more authentic emotional self.  

The final section of Mali’s collection, Silent Retreat, further reflects the speaker’s preoccupation with the mechanism of Self as seen through the mind. Mali uses minimally titled poems “Day One” through “Day “Seven” to illustrate a seven-day rendezvous of the Self—with the Self. This last section, though fluently connecting with and continuing previous motifs, slows the expansiveness of previous sections in an effort to meditate and meet the mind where it is at. Though gracefully accomplished, the exuberance and drive experienced prior is lost. Metaphorically, the last section is an unexpected docking of a ship.  And because this ship once led you through beautiful and unexpected terrain—you want more. This, in all honesty, is probably not a bad thing. Instead, it is testament to the talent and strength of the speaker.

   

           Steady, My Gaze is a book that challenges ideologies about the Self and God. It is a book about identity both on the page and off of the page. And when Mali says, “Give me your hand. Let’s shatter the idols between us,” you want to. You do it because you know the journey of the self, as she has portrayed it, is one of the most earnest journeys, one that heals and moves all of us toward compassion, acceptance, and truth.

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Diana Marie Delgado, poet and playwright, grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. A graduate of the poetry programs at the University of California-Riverside and Columbia University, she served as Poet-in-Residence of Northern New Mexico College and was awarded the 2005 James D. Phelan Award in Poetry from the San Francisco Foundation. Her work has appeared in the Indiana Review, North American Review, the Journal of Chicana/Latino Studies and Ploughshares. The recipient of the 2010 Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship, she was awarded a month-long stay at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota. Her poetry collection, Late-Night Talks with Men I Think I Trust, was a finalist for the 2012 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, and her short play, Desire Road, will be given a public reading in the Summer 2012. She is a member of the CantoMundo and Macondo writing communities. You can follow her at the blog, Pom-PomRituals / Tiny Umbrellas.