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.”
*
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.]
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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.]
