In February, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs held its annual conference in Kansas City, Missouri. Like so many writers with a first book newly published, I wanted to capitalize on the confluence of students and teachers, authors and readers, and all the miscellaneous literati convened by a gathering of such numbers. (My cab driver claimed sixteen thousand of us had descended on this city he’d come to call home.) There was flesh to be pressed, cheeks to be kissed, and elbows to rub. But when push came to shove, I couldn’t do it. I bailed on the book fair, panels, and presentations. I wondered whether this was a shared experience among other emerging writers or simply symptomatic of my own pressurizing anxiety about bringing a collection of poems into the world for the first time.
Instead, I stretched my legs and explored downtown Kansas City on foot. Eventually, I came upon Indian Mound Park, a modest clearing that is home to earthenworks and waist-high stone walls constructed by native people who inhabited the land between eight hundred and a thousand years ago, easily predating the arrival of anyone whose descendants might come to understand themselves as Westerners. Originally, these ancient humans raised this mound—this knoll or butte1—in alignment with the red giant Arcturus, but the star has since wandered. Now, the mounds point to nothing but their own history, a testament to the people who once stood there, who must have also admired the land, their surroundings, one another. It strikes me as similar to the predicament of poets who, in our delicate construction of signs, syllables, and symbols, strive to compose a song of the human condition, of its unquenchable desire to know more, to see more, to feel more. Those who, no doubt, likewise cast eyes skyward in search of answers, or solace, or silence, or someone.
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Asterism, Ae Hee Lee’s acoustically attuned, ruminating debut, takes its title from prominent clusters of stars that are not quite large enough to constitute constellations, as well as from the typographic symbol designed to draw attention to text that follows. In poems that are sticky with the cherry pit sound of “America” and equally amused and bemused by double meanings—like the replanting of a papa (father/potato)—Lee traces a personal and linguistic lineage from Korea to Peru to the United States, reveling in rolling words over the tongue like bright organic objects to be enjoyed or cherished. Lee’s speakers speak Korean, Spanish, and English, each language its own animal with its own idiosyncratic inflections. This range of diction affords unique insights into the ways even the tiniest phonemes can effect major transformations in meaning, such that a speaker can “savor the second a violet / turned violent in my radiant mouth.” For Lee, the visceral mechanics of the body’s acoustic organs—“the mouth’s ribbed cathedral” and “the dark side of teeth or a throat’s deep”—are inseparable from the sounds they produce. This embodied vocality yields alignments that are more profound than coincidence, but less direct than simple translations useful only in their utility, like when a speaker’s mother teaches her that “in Korean to forget is also expressed as to have peeled” or insists that she share a honeycrisp with her sister, “the sound of the word apple, sagwa, also meaning to ask for forgiveness.” But it’s not just intimate familial moments that receive bilingual, gustatory treatment. Even in acts of horrifying violence, Lee’s speaker spies morsels spilling over. In Trujillo, Peru, a preteen speaker witnesses a stabbing:
a man crouches
with a knife
buried under his ribs
i’m eleven and within the gash
i see glistening crimson
pearls strawberry candies removed
from a mouth’s viscous enclosure
sugar surrendering
its syrup to the sun
Made somehow beautiful, this lethal injury shimmers in the speaker’s young eyes, the imagined confections relinquishing their sweetness as the gored man’s body may well give up its ghost.2 Like an unfamiliar feast, Lee’s use of foodstuffs serves up a bewildering array of contradictions, corrections, and questions. At one point, the speaker confesses:
I’ve whispered to my crushes, Te quiero, while actually meaning,
I want you. I had to use a Japanese word, ginkgo, to explain
in English my first time seeing the splitting yellow
fans of eun-haeng leaves in Korea.
This misapplication of amorous action words, familiar to many speakers of Spanish as one of multiple languages, is the first in a sequence of multilingual transactions that eventually land in the vibrant golden leaves of trees familiar to the speaker from her native Korea. And yet, even upon returning to her country of birth, the speaker admits an elementary ignorance. In “Korea :: Things to Review Before Landing,” Lee pokes gentle fun at a mistake in translation recognizable to anyone who has referred to family in another language:
I thought my grandfather’s name was Hal-abeoji,
only to find out it was the Korean word for
grandfather.
In these ways, Lee triangulates a truly unique poetic voice that plays with sound and its many resonances, interrogates estrangement and affinity, and relishes the pluralizing delicacies of a multiethnic, multinational, multilingual heritage.
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A very different definition of “delicacy” applies to Santa Tarantula, in which Jordan Pérez upends conventional notions of domesticity and disrupts many forms of violence against women and femininity. By traversing the cane fields and labor camps of Cuba in the 1960s, profiling badass but historically bad-mouthed women of the Bible, and texturing a natural world rich with insects and undergrowth, Pérez pulls from myth and memory to imagine a broad spectrum of vile wrongdoings and concomitant remedies. One poem in particular stands as a kind of antithesis to Lee’s abundance of nutriments and victuals, to a speaker who can say: “In each country I call home, I eat my way into belonging.”
A startling, intentionally unbalanced four stanzas, “I Consider Violence” opens with “starvation-hair”—lanugo, commonly associated with anorexia—and apostrophizes a fetishizing second person, whose favorite part of the speaker is her “cupped hipbone, empty / as a half mango scooped clean of its flesh.” A devastating catalog of inedible comestibles follows:
I learn to fill myself with other things:
the julienned light in the bedroom, mouthfuls
of Debussy from the old piano, the endless suck
of the toilet, which, bravely, never stops running.
Even vowels become impossible luxuries,
so round they seem indulgent against my tongue.
The poem ends with a surprising image from scripture: the head of John the Baptist displayed on a platter. The speaker ponders the plight of Salome, who implored King Herod to decapitate the prophet, and thinks: “Maybe she was only hungry.” It’s a jarring twist, a perversion of the violence that disjointed John the Baptist at the brainstem, and it provides somber commentary on the destructive addiction from which the speaker ostensibly suffers. And yet, Pérez’s depiction is perfectly fitting: the popularly mythologized scene is called The Feast of Herod for a reason, after all.
Across its sparse and pointed, taut and haunting, often disturbing lyrics, Santa Tarantula is a stunning evisceration of gender and sex, one that is “unexpectedly intimate,” as Rebecca Morgan Frank has called it. At every turn, atrocious men stalk its pages, from the “one who force-feeds women / other women,” to the “one who amputates women’s / legs and sews them onto other / victims.” And while “The Men” depicts truly shocking scenes, as if clipped from a horror movie montage, Pérez intersperses otherwise innocuous activities to generate a kind of suspicious ambivalence or generalized anxiety:
the one who threads neat patches
into the toes of your socks, the one
who cuts his own name into women’s
faces, the one who carves a vegetable garden
into the backyard, the one who surgically removes
lips and keeps them floating in jars, the one
who steeps calendula blossoms in oil for winter
The poem’s final lines double down on this ambiguity:
the one who says I am not the other men,
the one who is not the others.
If “The Men” encapsulates the treacherous uncertainty that defines the terrain of daily life for many women, the book’s opening poem is more allusive, if equally unnerving. “Smallmouth” consists of an increasingly creepy list of that which “demands to be / known”: things like the “gnats / in their conductor’s / dance” and the “extra leaves / in the table.” But also: “The unchoked sob. / The white pants hidden / beneath the bed.” And: “The girl’s shirt / behind the shed.” Until finally:
The bitter walnut
in the stomach. The smallmouth
bass on the dock. You are more
wife than my wife
says your father.
The father’s statement can only be read as repulsive, an unwelcome suggestion, one that simultaneously sexualizes the daughter and infantilizes the wife. It’s designed to jolt readers off-kilter—and succeeds—but the experience is perhaps not as isolated as one might wish or imagine. In other poems, Pérez gives voice to women from the Bible who experience similar disrespect, abuses, and trauma. These include Gomer (adulterous wife of the prophet Hosea, called a “harlot” and “whore”), Delilah (who betrayed the folk hero Samson, regarded as a treacherous seductress), Tamar (daughter-in-law to Judah, blamed for the deaths of his sons, later impregnated by Judah), and Jael (a heroine of the Israelites who drove a tent peg through the skull of an enemy). In “Lot’s Daughter,” Pérez complicates the question of victimhood by depicting the Hebrew figurehead as both an aggressive perpetrator of revolting incestual advances but also one made drunk by his daughter and fooled into doing so:
The wine dribbles
through his neck and through my fingers
and he smiles up at me: this disgusting beautiful
fatherface. His mouth is the color of rose syrup.
I hold his body like the son I must have.
Scholars have framed this seriously twisted incident as a cautionary tale of divine vengeance, as a metaphor for Christians’ relationship with the Church, or as a desperate measure required to continue a bloodline. By reframing the biblical narrative, Pérez alludes to all the aforementioned interpretations, but also centers the human stories: what should we think about women put into these vile situations? And what kind of God not only permits, but compels his creations to behave in these ways? Perhaps, more importantly, like skeptics hell-bent on mining scripture for inconsistencies or children thrown to the wolves by their fathers, readers may find themselves asking: “What God?”
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In Pentimento, a dextrous first book that wrestles with past mistakes, regrets, and reversements shrouded in the lingering resentments of religious hang-ups, Joshua Garcia confronts questions of divinity and desire. Like Pérez, Garcia also revisits the story of Lot by bringing the central characters into contemporary times. “Lot’s Wife Shopping in a Pandemic” figures the unnamed woman who eventually freezes into a pillar of salt as defying stay-at-home orders to buy jeans and admire herself in the mirror. In another poem, “Epistle (Deluge),” the speaker contemplates the state of his own beliefs:
I have been asking myself
whether I still believe in God, and though I don’t have an answer,
I remember the moment the question first formed, sounding
inside me like a firework cracking in the distance, opening like a pocket of air
rising to the water’s surface to meet more of itself.
The self-recognition of air to greater air is like an inverted breath prayer, a bubble of doubt rising within the self to join a wider, secular atmosphere. Garcia’s reconsiderations of his Christian faith pursue his speaker throughout the book and spill over into other identities. Another epistolary poem, “(Memento Mori),” extends a line of dubiety into the realms of race and ethnicity:
I am sometimes asked whether I call myself Latino.
I don’t speak the language, but I carry the name, a marker
which, for some, bends with the imagination (my dentist once called me José).
Anyone of color who’s been called the wrong name by a white person (Yours Truly included) will likely recognize the equal measures of annoyance and amusement such careless confusion can generate. On the occasions when Garcia does deploy humor, it’s often sardonic, designed to undercut with stinging commentary, whether it’s the image of a hypocritical wealthy savior (“$450 million & Christ goes yachting with a Saudi prince”) or reimagining the biblical Eve’s genesis as originating from Adam’s baculum, the penis bone “missing in human men but apparent in other mammals, / resulting in the shared perineal raphé, or scar.” The speaker snarkily remarks:
I like the idea that the whole world is born from a scar,
but I have long since abandoned literal interpretations
of the myth that man comes first and then, if she’s lucky, woman.
This sexist, discarded trope belies the speaker’s own tentative relationship with physical intimacy, as questions of sex and pleasure plague Pentimento’s speakers. “Self-Portrait as a Virgin,” tours typical stops on the gay dating scene (a drag show, karaoke, a friend’s wedding, cruising the beach, a manicure) and obsesses over consummation and light: a “crowd waves dollar bills to stoke / the kindling, to feed that which consumes / and does not consume”; “the moon shines with a consummate light”; a “bride and groom take / two candles, light a third, each flame consumed / by the other at the wick”; et cetera. Another poem apostrophizes the reader—a stand-in for the speaker—who is “virginal at 30,” and initiates a dream sequence wherein a married man initiates:
you don’t stop him when he takes your face
in his hands or when the weight of his belt comes off or when the
weight of him on top of you, everything coming off.
A long poem that uses the f-slur3 as its title and includes photographs of the author that recreate Hal Fisher’s “Archetypal Media Images” dives more deeply into definitions of sex (“Penetration? / completion? / Just making each other feel good?”) and arrives full circle in an unexpected image of paternal warmth:
In a dream, your father calls to you in Spanish:
Mi hijo.
Though you do not speak the language he inherited, you hear it as you might hear the
sun breathing across your face in the summer, as you might hear, suddenly and with
the ease of a familiar touch, the letters of your name traced out in the freckles on your
skin.
This refreshing, evocative, literally touching impression captures the way a familial language can summon a kind of synesthesia, sunlight refracted into breeze, into name, into complexion. For Garcia, sex and gender and language and identity connect through the dreamsong of memory and family, through utterances whispered across generations, regardless of whether they translate literally or through the timeless, cherished tesseract of poetry.
*
In her English language debut, a unique, trilingual translation of How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems, indigenous Zoque writer Mikeas Sánchez likewise convenes past into present. Sánchez writes in Spanish and Zoque—a language native to southern Mexico—and the book has been translated by Wendy Call and Shook, who include the original Zoque lyrics in red typeface, with Spanish in gray and English in black on facing pages. The result is a testament to the power and importance of preserving through translation lyric poetry in languages across the Americas, especially with an author as talented and intuitively attuned to the transference of knowledge and wisdom across generations and, indeed, millennia as Sánchez.
Like Garcia, Sánchez invokes a form of facial recognition that both predates advanced technology, and transcends it. Here, too, the speaker invokes the ancestors in a way that connects face to name:
I recognized your face like I did the path
that led me to your unspoken name
And so I kept an altar of palm and
bougainvillea
at the center of my soul
And so I was a pepper-scented temple
The direct embodiment of a redolent house of worship is immediately striking, and kudos are due to translators Call and Shook for extracting the expressive consonantal combination of fricative and plosive sounds in the six quick syllables of “pepper-scented temple.” But unlike the night visions of Garcia’s speaker, the grandfather and grandmother of Sánchez approach the language of the colonizers differently. On the one hand:
My grandfather Simón wanted to be a
good savage,
he learned Spanish,
and all the saints’ names.
On the other:
My grandmother never learned Spanish
was afraid of forgetting her gods
The universe of Sánchez’s imagining contains multitudinous divinities, a stark contrast to the agonizing anxiety of Garcia’s recovering Christians, and the tortured, transgressive figures of Perez’s biblical women.4
A quick roll call includes: Wind Lord, Fire King, Great Sower, Volcano Goddess, Volcano Queen, Forest Guardian, Mountain King, Wind Goddess, and Storm God. These godheads are not so much impressive figures who command genuflection, or even really characters at all, in the poems. They simply exist, part and parcel of the world-building Sánchez achieves through a wondrous, occasionally plainspoken style that offers a welcome accessibility that never stoops to simplicity.
Where Sánchez revisits the idea of a singular deity, “God is a flower-shaped cloud / observing the sunset / with blinded eyes.”5 This unseeing sight, an impossibly sensate experience for an apparently sentient, wispy cirrus overhead, remains grounded in this physical world, even as it moves beyond it. Another poem, “The Soul Returns to Silence’s Cry,” opens with a Zoque prayer and a depiction of an immortal soul that seeks seawater and sand, only to find “sweetest saltpeter where traces of God’s / body linger.” The tactility of this image almost demands readers rub their own fingers together, as if in search of such grainy perspiration they themselves produce.
For Sánchez, the corporeal form of a celestial being is less interesting than the ways it interacts with, subsumes, or replenishes the human people here on this planet.
*
The godbody denotes a similarly carnal if distinctly different entity for Justin Rovillos Monson, author of American Inmate, a poet who occupies the unenviable—but unpitiable—position of writing from behind bars. Through an inventive array of poetic forms and a generous sampling of writers and musicians, as well as documents from the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC), Monson articulates personal and collective desires for connection, recognition, and liberty: “We want to live in a space // free of calendars & clocks & the minutes / we must share but the high / fruits are not ready to fall from this / life.” Indeed, many entries in Monson’s debut meditate on time, the passage of, quandaries related to, and inconsistencies related to measuring such. “Ontology of God” introduces another inmate, Big Mike, who says:
“I read that dogs
don’t have a sense of time” a minute
is like an hour an hour like a day
a day like a minute. The continuity
is skewed & time is placed without
thought into various boxes. I think
what it must be like to be
a dog because yes I be
with my dogs in this massive cage
trying to exhaust every thread
of thought surrounding time.
The poem plays with the inversions of “dog” and “god,” and goes on to mention two other men incarcerated alongside the speaker and Big Mike: Ciph and Civ, who “claim Godbody / & who am I to tell them otherwise / when we all want to claim / master key to lock silo to grain / & again own the contents // of our own duffle bags & spoken / languages without restraint.” From a glossary of “TERMS FOR THE UNINITIATED,” readers unfamiliar with the term “godbody” will learn that it’s “typically an original man who is the embodiment of knowledge, responsibility, and many other divine attributes.” Another note adds that the term derives “from the Nation of Gods and Earths (NGE), a cultural organization commonly known as the Five Percenters.” By this understanding, the godbody is indivisible from the human who inhabits it, an idea that’s vital for the men of American Inmate to reclaim dignity in prison.
Throughout the book, Monson utilizes a variety of idiosyncratic formal strategies, at least one of which appears to be completely unique to this body of work. “He Says He’s Maddecent / The Vapors (JSTLKMVMT remix)” employs the Wavytape form, created by JSTLKMVMT, credited as a producer, DK, poet, and editor. This hybrid form uses the found text format of recordkeeping, inspired by Japanese ziuhitsu, and Monson cites Narrow Road to the Interior by Kimiko Hahn, as well as “the vignettes and dynamic improvisations used in modern poetic sequences” of Walt Whitman and Galway Kinnell.
The Wavytape form represents an ambitious and fascinating combination of inspirations and sources, and it’s worth noting that Monson’s use of it appears to be the first such instance in print. But American Inmate is less a showy encyclopedia, and more a curated playlist: epigraphs cite Ta-Nehisi Coates, Guillaume Apollinaire, Kendrick Lamar. Back matter notes recognize the influence of fellow Filipino poet Patrick Rosal, explain Harlem rapper Cam’ron’s early aughts obsession with pink Range Rovers, and articulate the restrictive MDOC Policy Directive covering “Prisoner Mail.” The resulting poems are unparalleled in their power to enlighten ignorant readers and challenge assumptions about sources of creative generation.
For all its formal invention, many of American Inmate’s most remarkable lines occur in moments of reflective contemplation, as when the speaker gazes upward at the heavens from the yard:6
The silver concertina
coiled all around us, the men
movin’ in ciphers and circles
sights held down to pavement
or lifted up to the sky
and on the softball diamond
in puddles of rainwater
an infinite stretch of blue
and high, high up, the jet streams
connect all the cirrus thrones
Another poignant poem revisits problems of time by posing the question directly: “What’s a decade / to / a natural / life?” Yet others serve as testament to the power of collective bonds formed between men with their backs against the wall. In “Education,” an inmate named Los reluctantly admits he can’t read, and the group of men assembled for mentoring class joins together to support him:
I wish you could have witnessed the stoic
faces of these thirty-six muscled men
in their state-blues, in their beards & their locks
& fades, when Los locked his eyes to the floor
& the men became a chorus of gods
code-switching the Dozens into a free
style of madlove.
The poem is emblematic of Monson’s dedication to balancing between lives; what Kierkegaard would divide into aesthetic and ethical, Monson unites into a poetics of mutual support and communal well-being, while still preserving a voice that is undeniably exceptional.
*
Monson’s incorporation of hip-hop lyrics and slang, specifically his mentions of Cam’ron and The Diplomats, made me feel weirdly seen. My strongest memories of high school include me at the wheel of the (extremely uncool) charcoal Dodge Stratus my younger brothers and I tricked out with 18˝ carbon rims, remote start system, and JVC El Kameleon CD player, “Oh Boy” bumping from the entirely stock speakers, the three of us on our way to University High for the day. It would only last a year, this time together during a quick commute across our small hometown to school, before our intertwined lives began to unspool into young adulthood and college, all the uncertainties bound up in the open road of unknown futures.
I’m reminded of the only stop on my flâneur’s tour of downtown Kansas City that I’d scheduled in advance: I’d placed an order at local streetwear brand Made Mobb and wanted to pop in their retail storefront to pick up a red and yellow cap with “KC” stitched onto it. The colors were no coincidence: an obvious nod to the local NFL team, which went on to win the Super Bowl the very day I flew back to Chicago. And from that window seat en route to ORD, I thought about the vast landscape of emerging poets, each one of us in search of the words, the lines, the images, the time to build our funny machines made of language. From this thirty-thousand-foot view, tracking over the riparian bends of the Missouri, then Mississippi, as they wend through vast farmland and eventual concrete blocking of the suburbs and city, along an initial approach and final landing, it’s a promising picture, indeed.
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*An essay-review of
Asterism. By Ae Hee Lee. North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2024. 80 pp. $21.95.
SantaTarantula. By Jordan Pérez. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2024. 80 pp. $18.00, paper.
Pentimento. By Joshua Garcia. Mount Vernon, NY: Black Lawrence Press, 2024. 80 pp. $17.95.
How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems. By Mikeas Sánchez. Translated from Zoque and Spanish by Wendy Call and Shook. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2024. 208 pp. $18.00, paper.
American Inmate. By Justin Rovillos Monson. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024. 80 pp. $17.00, paper.
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1. Using online dictionaries, one can trace the etymology of debut backward from current French usage—which mirrors the English in meaning—through Middle French for “to move or to begin,” and eventually arrive at butte, Old French for “mound or knoll.”
2. “Carry / strawberry candies in your pocket,” the speaker of “Liturgy,” from Jordan Pérez’s Santa Tarantula, encourages the reader, in order to endure another difficult day.
3. Section vi of the poem explains that the term is “borrowed from Old French”:
a cross to bear
a stake at which to burn
You are tied to these words by a primordial flame.
4. Sánchez does devote one poem to Aisha, a child bride to the prophet Mohammed, which lands with pitch-perfect disturbance:
She will anoint her wedding dress
with the scent of hashish and cinnamon
so that her groom doesn’t not discover
the scent of other men that lingers on her
skin
5. This image of a flower-bodied god provides a convenient dovetailing to lyrics of one poem in Ae Hee Lee’s Asterism, in which the speaker learns her name means: “flower with a shining throat for a lantern.”
6. “YARD: fenced-in area within a correctional institution where inmates workout, politic, use the phone, etc.; the general population area of a correctional institution (‘dog had to get off the yard’) (ref. Back-Forty).”
