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microreview: La Movida by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta

José Angel Araguz 2 Comments

review by José Angel Araguz

In my research (read: Googling) as I spent time with La Movida by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta (Nightboat Books) I came across the following lines shared by more than one Tumblr account:

There’s a weapon I wish
I could wield
when I feel the vomit of your gaze
hit the side of my face.
I want an education
in remembering
and I want an education
in forgetting.
I fast until the basket is done,
throw my maidenhead into the trash,
and relish the solidarity
of absolute feminine horror.

These lines come from the poem “Men Who Cannot Love” and serve as a solid example of Luboviski-Acosta’s poetic sensibility throughout this collection. The direct engagement with metaphor juxtaposed with the pathos of the speaker’s voice here make for an immediate and visceral reading experience.

And yet, for the dynamic flex of technique, the lines–here and elsewhere in this collection–feel relatable, biting but not bitter. I would call this a bright emotional range: bright meaning joyful but also illuminating, like flame. Just the kind of thing to share across the glowing screens of social media, a glow sought out for the intimacy it promises.

In an interview, Luboviski-Acosta calls this a collection of love poems, and to a refreshing extent this is true. These poems call out for love and enact it through linguistically surprising phrasing and an ability to draw out a range of tones from raw, honest meditations.

This love, however, comes not without an awareness of what one risks in loving. There are times in these poems where the very language breaks. In “Saw You in My Nightmares / See You in My Dreams”, for example, we have a number of lines that break a word in half (e.g. “wan / der,” “thou / sand”).

These moves force the eye to simultaneously halt while also be urged on by this word-break: halted on a number of possible meanings, and urged on to the meaning of the moment (the moment colored by the break). It is in these cracked words and the flux and urgency created that one feels briefly the cost and the joy of the kinds of love Luboviski-Acosta is celebrating here.

While the title phrase has political connotations — and Luboviski-Acosta is indeed creating feminist and punk liberatory spaces in these poems — I couldn’t help but think of how I knew the phrase growing up. “La movida” is what my tia would tease me about, encouraging me to make a move on whatever woman I talked with on the phone as a teen. This brief anecdote has its problematic tone to interrogate: while my tia may have encouraged me because I was a boy, were I a girl she would be warning against boys like me trying to dar la movida.

This conflicting albeit toxic-heteronormative take on the title feels like something Luboviski-Acosta would have readers engage with, especially in light of the the title poem itself, which also closes the book.

In this poem, the speaker engages in a breathless direct address to another person that ranges from casual flirting to an all-out cosmic declaration of love. As the poem develops, the speaker makes their move, so to speak, in lines that ring across the dance floor with clear, lyric vibrancy.

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La Movida can be purchased from Nightboat Books.

Also, here’s the dynamic interview mentioned above where Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta discusses this collection.

Lastly, check out the opening poem as well for a further treat.

microreview: like everything else we loved by sarah a. chavez

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

review by José Angel Araguz

A copy of the micro chapbook like everything else we loved by Sarah A. Chavez framed by flowers.
A copy of the micro chapbook like everything else we loved by Sarah A. Chavez framed by flowers.

Early on in like everything else we loved by Sarah A. Chavez, a micro chapbook published by Porkbelly Press, the reader is presented a scene in which the speaker describes a hole where the city has uprooted a tree as follows:

Like losing you, the loss of the tree
was quick. One day, diagnosis, next
dust from the wood chipper coated
the large hole in the grass
where the stump was pulled out.
Such a big hole. So big I could
sit in it, so I did, and ran my hand
along the edges of root
left connectionless beneath
the grassy surface. I put my tongue
to the limbs’ ashes, the saw dust
sticking to my shirt and pants.

This image of the speaker not only observing but dwelling on the dismantling and death of another, specifically of a tree, is legit enough. But the image of the speaker in the hole, physically present in the absence of the tree, serves as a metaphor for this project, underscoring grief as exploration marked and forged by persistent excavation of the self and of memory.

In this collection, Chavez adds to her series of “Dear Carole” poems that have become their own body of work within her larger body of work (which can be found across her full-length collections Hands That Break & Scar (Sundress Publications, 2017) and All Day, Talking (dancing girl press, 2014)). The poems of like everything else we loved are elegiac epistolary poems, poems that celebrate and hold space for the grief and love the speaker in them feels for Carole, and doing so through the direct address of a letter. Yet, it’s the poetic sensibility on display in these poems — a sensibility able to honor a lost loved one in a way that is intimate as well as accessible — that marks the accomplishment and gift they are to the elegiac and epistolary traditions.

The poem from which the image above comes from, for example, is entitled “Dear Carole, Dermatologists Call the Body a ‘Trunk’,” a title that in its word choice and phrasing invites us into the realm of gossip and daily life. There’s an urgency to this address, a sense of having found something out that only one other person will understand, accompanied by the need to share it. One feels you are overhearing two kindred spirits alive together through the fact of the poem.

While the epistolary form necessarily marks it as a one-sided conversation, the voice in this and other poems in the series takes its time meditating and speaking to Carole in empathetic, blunt, and candid ways. The result is a voice whose honesty is animate and grows before the reader. In this way, poetry creates a space of connection, of relating, of inside jokes and acknowledged flaws, and ultimately of mattering.

The image of the speaker in the hole is almost like they would press themselves into the Earth similarly as the writer presses the words onto the page. I think I keep coming back to this image because of how honest it feels. It’s the kind of thing you’d share with someone only if they mattered to you. In sharing with Carole in these poems, the speaker evokes for us the richness and depth of mattering.

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like everything else we loved can be purchased from Porkbelly Press.
To check out more of Sarah A. Chavez’s work, check out her site.
Lastly, here’s a dynamic essay where Chavez breaks down her thoughts on “Working Class Poetry.”