Tag literature

microreview: What Can I Tell You?: Selected Poems by Roberto Carlos Garcia

José Angel Araguz 1 Comment

review by José Angel Araguz

One of the unique experiences of being a poet / poetry reader is becoming accustomed with the creature known as the “selected poems.” The closest equivalent from outside the poetry world comes in the form of the “greatest hits” album. Yet, the novelty and nostalgic flash of such an album doesn’t exactly feel right with poetry.

Perhaps a volume of selected poems allows us to tap into a similar experience Italo Calvino speaks about in his essay “Collection of Sand”:

“I have finally come around to asking myself what is expressed in that sand of written words which I have strung together throughout my life, that sand that seems to me to be so far away from the beaches and desert of living. Perhaps by staring at the sand as sand, words as words, we can come close to understanding how and to what extent the world that has been ground down and eroded can still find in sand a foundation and model.”

This idea of glimpsing “a foundation and model” for literary experience through engaging with a writer’s collected body of work is, for me, an apt guide into the selected poems experience. Just as Calvino invites his reader into a communal act of assessment and study, readers of poetry are invited into a similar communal act, only one that includes celebration as much as reckoning.

Which is another way of saying: selected poems allow us to catch up.

It is in the experience of catching up that I encourage readers to enter What Can I Tell You?: Selected Poems (FlowerSong Press) by Roberto Carlos Garcia. Across the three poetry collections gathered here in this volume, one can see Garcia establishing a foundation and model for poetic experience, meditation, and interrogation that ranges in depth and practice.

“Duplicity,” for example, has Garcia setting up the idea of subversive doubleness as it is experienced in the survival consciousness:

Hard truth:

First thing I do
as I breathe into a room
is search
for brown & black faces,
bobbing in America’s
post racial waters

Here, truth is experienced in the body, breathed as one enters a room and immediately seeks out the familiar. Before connection and presence, the speaker here admits to a need for safety. The phrase “post racial waters” also hits here and underscores the jarring contemporary moment for racialized peoples. This phrase gestures toward the systemic oppression behind that makes the negotiation being depicted here necessary.

This hard truth is followed by another hard truth toward the end of the poem:

Hard truth:

Light & Dark
sparkle the waters
like tinsel,
pretty chimera

No one really
has to

Does anyone really
have to?

Talk to me–

This move toward abstraction and image evokes the need for connection, fleshes it out into a need for beauty. The question “Does anyone really / have to?” is an interrupted one; it mirrors the opening of the poem (centered on an act of survival) and jars it, troubles it in an existential way. The move to end the poem with another interruption, the fragment “Talk to me–” is powerful for the way it simultaneously completes the question of the previous stanza while also serving as plea and demand.

This push and pull–from seeking to demanding–is similar to the push and pull experience the speaker is going through. Who is safe? Who is in this room with me? Who can I be in this room? These are questions that come readily to the minds of marginalized peoples navigating public spaces. In a way, what is being created here and in other poems throughout Garcia’s ouevre is a foundation and model for survival.

A similar drive can be found in the various “mixtape” poems in Garcia’s body of work. The mixtape is a form created by the poet themselves and “which resembles a cento in that it is composed of lines borrowed from other poets but also includes lines from fiction, non-fiction, rap lyrics, and other forms of literature…[and] is between 50 to 100 lines long and should have at least ten original lines written by the poet.” In “from Mixtape for City Kids from Dysfunctional but Happy Families, Kids Like Me,” one can see the payoff of such formal ambition:

Yes, you’ll survive. Look at me.
I’m shocked too, I’m supposed to be locked up too,
you escape what I escaped you’d be in Paris
getting fucked up too. My father said…surviving
one thing means another comes & kills you.
He’s dead, & so, I trust him. I know this isn’t much.

Here, survival as a theme appears again in the first line, and is given further depth by the interpolation of the Jay-Z lyrics in the second, third, and half of the fourth line. Survival leading to escape is a striking focus; the lines about the father take this focus to another level. And while the form brings together a number of borrowed voices, one can hear Garcia’s sensibility in the pathos of “I know this isn’t much.”

This latter sentiment can be found in several moments across Garcia’s poems. There’s this line from “Belief System,” a stunning poem of self-reflection that ends with “When I weep like this everyone hates me.” A hint of this dejected self-awareness can be found elsewhere in the ending of “Clean”: “I know the universe is within this body / & that somewhere along the way I forgot it.” Tracking this developing sensibility is just one of the thrills and rewards of reading What Can I Tell You?.

There are other formal experiments taken on by Garcia that are worth tracking and catching up on. These three poems published at The Acentos Review are good examples of Garcia’s ability to engage and trouble voice in inventive and dynamic ways. Across three poems, Garcia shows himself to have a distinct sense of line break as well as a clear understanding of the impact of visual presentation. Yet, with all this attention to craft, Garcia’s interrogation and reckoning with Latinidad in necessary and crucial ways remains consistent.

There was also, for me, the rare surprise of finding a revised version of a poem I was familiar with. This previous version of “Back to School” (second poem at the link) is one I’ve taught and connected with students on. In the version found in What Can I Tell You?, there is, among other changes, the move from third to first person. This move grounds an already powerful poem into a distinct presence. Within the scope of this selected poems, noting this revision feels like a distinct glimpse into a poet’s inner conversation and stakes.

The notes I made on the way to this review are messy and many. This messiness is perhaps another characteristic of reading and enjoying a book of selected poems. I haven’t even discussed Garcia’s facility with lyric prose; the title piece of his second collection black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric–a lyric prose piece honoring the complexity of the Afro-Latinx experience–this piece alone pays back a thousandfold the cost of purchasing this book.

I kept returning to the question of the title while reading. At times its question came off like a generous ask, an invitation; at other times, it reflected despair and persistence in the face of irrational, unforgiving systemic oppression. Throughout What Can I Tell You?, this title question is answered by the body of work Garcia has gifted us with here. Through this work, a foundation and model comes together and gives hope and direction for what poetry can name, reckon with, and bring light to.

*

What Can I Tell You?: Selected Poems can be found at FlowerSong Press.
Find out more about Roberto Carlos Garcia’s work, at his site.

microreview: Dear Outsiders by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

review by José Angel Araguz

One of the first clues into the framing narrative of Dear Outsiders by Jenny Sadre-Orafai comes straight from its stunning cover. This image of two people blending into one only to reveal the sea, one learns through reading, works to evoke the experience of the two siblings who serve as the speakers for this collection. Sadre-Orafai makes use of the first-person plural throughout in ways that reflect the blurring of boundaries and experience.

The presence of the sea is a starker matter; its presence speaks to the death by drowning of the siblings’ parents. The other element to take note of is the title itself. The first-person plural “we” here often feels like it’s addressing the reader in a direct, intimate way, similar to a letter.

These elements come together in startling and powerful ways. In “Low Recitation,” for example, a scene of the two siblings looking over maps quickly devolves:

We try to see different pictures, but the blue is kudzu, silencing the land. Name the world’s seven continents. Name the world’s five oceans. We think we see our mother’s body shape there.

Here, note the way the first sentence describes a sensory conflict, the siblings unable to “see” the map as a map. This sensory conflict, despite the effort to focus and “name,” further develops, with the final sentence in this excerpt showing how grief is pushing through. This sudden impression of their dead mother brings to mind the way grief can be said to come in “waves.”

The image of waves is ideal in getting a sense of the accumulative reading experience Dear Outsiders invites. There are poems depicting memories, some light, some dark; there are recurring statements as well as rich evocations of sea and beach town life. There are also a number of list poems, each a catalogue of reflecting from the details of this world in a rich, revealing ways. In “Boat Call,” a list of boat names ranges from the expected (“Argo / Cheers / Anchor Boy”) and the humorous (“Knot From Around Here”) to the more emotionally charged (“Verdant Hope” “Don’t Panic”).

This sequence helps add a further depth to the narrative. Along with further details of the world of these poems, they also work to vary the tone. In fact, the range in tone across the collection is a revelation to itself.

Yet, even in this variation, grief is underscored. “Historical Overview” has the siblings sharing:

Our parents tell us that all the water in the world has been here forever. The world will never make new water. Don’t bother trying to ask in your baby song.

This sobering, stern tone alongside the more distant, objective tone of the list poems are moments in the collection that give a sense of the siblings as children “trying on” specific tones modeled by their parents. By varying between these “parent” tones and the list poems, the more intimate, mourning tone comes across all the more charged and urgent.

This mirroring of the parents becomes clear by the end of the collection when an earlier reference to the parents keeping an inventory of what the siblings wear each day (“in case we’re abducted”) is brought back to mind in the final list poem, “In Case of Abduction.” This list poem is made up of three columns: one column of dates faces two columns listing sets of clothes worn; the gut punch comes toward the end of the poem which is made up of a series of dates but nothing listed for them.

The visual of this last list poem–that of an incomplete list–drives home the distinct elegiac experience Sadre-Orafai has created here for us. The days keep going, while the one keeping track of them does not. At the core of this experience is family, those people in our lives whose presence point us to the past and future as much as the present.

The title, then, takes on another meaning in the face of these multi-layered relationship. When one close to us dies, they, too, become dear despite being outside this existence.

*

Dear Outsiders can be purchased from University of Akron Press.
Check out more poems from Dear Outsiders here.
Here’s another microreview, this time of Sadre-Orafai’s Malak.
Find out more about Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s work, at her site.