Pimp / Iceberg Slim / 1967

Pimp / Iceberg Slim / 1967

Pimp is the memoir of Robert Lee Maupin, who spent 24 years of his life enslaving women in sex work and performing a variety of other cons for a life of lavish, fear, drugs, degradation, and prison. I’d like to imagine that this memoir is simply unpublishable these days, but we have a rapist in the White House. America likely has the appetite for a Pimp 2.0. 

Maupin narrates his life with stunning narrative clarity and verve. Pimp is a masterclass on pacing. Reading Pimp is like watching a car crash in hi-definition with multiple camera angles to zoom and hawk out: it’s spellbinding and horrible. Pimp combines flashy writing with probing observation and reflection. Maupin doesn’t cut himself much slack in acknowledging the wretchedness of his crimes. He doesn’t try the readers’ patience in asking for a forgiveness or compassion he doesn’t deserve. In this way, Maupin creates an enticing ethos, giving the reader the sense that they are truly glimpsing into the life of a hardened Black criminal underworld. Maupin makes the reader a trick, using their morbid curiosity and desire to eat the other as a hook for his self-mythos. Likewise, the rugged oscillation between cold observation and confessional trauma dumping on the page likely mirror the same charisma that ensnared a number of young women in the flesh. 

As in any memoir, the writing obviously cuts away some of the complexities of life, using composite characters and so forth, to present a narrative that’s easier to follow. Sometimes, the narrative voice is so street it’s comic. By the third time, Maupin claims to “skull-note” something, I’m facepalming at how goofy he sounds. There’s also a scene where Maupin describes his first con--dressing in drag to lure in and rob white tricks eager for Black pussy--which reminded me of the homoerotic and genderbending scenes of Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle. Early on, I realized that Paul Beatty actually satirizes Iceberg Slim’s voice in The White Boy Shuffle, from the slang to the fishbowl voyeurism into Black poverty to the queer scenes. 

I wanted to read Pimp to potentially teach it in a hip-hop literature course alongside To Pimp a Butterfly. Unfortunately, it feels irresponsible to teach Pimp. It provides too much fodder for an undergraduates’ racist biases. Even if you had an undergraduate class with the social savvy and chops to engage the text, it is simply too misogynistic, foul, and horrifying to expect many people to stomach it. In the copy, Maupin calls Pimp a manual, akin to the Art of War by Sun Tzu. It’s true enough. Maupin does provide the rationale and strategy for enslaving women and dodging the law. It’s definitely outdated by now, but some principles likely still apply. Yet, I’m still tempted to teach it. Like The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Pimp opens with a first-person description of the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. Pimp is another side of the coin of the violences of racism, poverty, patriarchy, and misogyny. What it says about America is horrifying, but bitterly honest. 

Pimp ends with a story of Maupin’s reformation into a best-selling writer with a wife and three daughters, living a square-ass life. Whether Maupin deserved this redemption or not, his story does demonstrate the ability of people to grow and change into functional members of society. His stints in prison were truly wretched, but justice and healing aren’t transactional. In any ethical world, Maupin would have carried the weight of his crimes for life and he likely did. Some of the best writing in Pimp comes from his descriptions of prison--including an eye-popping prison break. I want to talk with prison abolitionists about Pimp. Maupin’s stunning writing, reformation, and reflection raise questions about abolition, crime, and justice worth teasing out if you can bear the disgusting realities of its world.  

5/5

Huida Constante / Manuel Tzoc / 2016

Constante Hida / Manuel Tzoc / 2016

My friend brought me back Constante Huida by Manuel Tzoc back from Guatemala this past fall. I've been itching to read their work for years and was so grateful! Tzoc is a monumental queer Maya writer from Guatemala, one of the first voices you’ll have recommended to you when you ask. That said, I’m not sure if this is the collection by which to get to know Tzoc’s work. Most of the collection is a well-crafted irreverent queer ennui diatribe. While Tzoc sprinkles the collection with playful puns and eye-catching images here and there, there are one too many poems bemoaning the challenges of writing for me to understand where all the pomp was coming from. There are definitely glimpses of real pathos on the page, such as “por el día/por los días.” Either way, I’m glad to have read it and will be seeking out more of his work. 2 out 5

The Undocumented Americans / Karla Cornejo Villavicencio / 2020

As an employee at a refugee-serving organization and former megaphone-wielding activist for undocumented folks, I admit I’m likely a mark for stories like the ones in The Undocumented Americans. However, since I spend quite a bit of time with these stories and the discourse around them, I usually have my fair share of critiques of how the stories are being told or used. Cornejo Villavicencio’s unvarnished depictions of the undocumented in all their human oddity, mundanity, and trauma resists the common romanticization of the immigrant community and creates an infinitely more familiar portrait of the undocumented. Cornejo’s coverage of Flint’s undocumented community and the undocumented who served as first-responders during 9/11 are especially provocative examples of the injustices undocumented folks suffer that usually get overlooked within the explosion of discourse around them. My only real criticism of the book is that at one point Cornejo Villavicencio critiques newspapers for referring to the undocumented as “undocumented workers as if all these men are worth is their labor” (paraphrase). For a community afforded so little, I get where this critique is coming from; however, I do see value in hearkening to the labor rights traditions of the left and in acknowledging the contributions of undocumented folks.  Regardless, I cried several times when reading this book and found its stories a useful reminder of the actual conditions too often invisibilized in the US. 5 out of 5.

Pornografía para piromaníacos / Wenceslao Bruciaga / 2023

I picked this book up at a Guatemalan bookstore based off the title and premise alone, and I was blown away. My interest in erotic literature started with Anais Nin earlier this year, where I was surprised that something that was ostensibly smut could have so much to say about intimacy, queerness, and relationships, veering into the unsayable aspects of human experience. I entered Pornografia para piromaniacos piqued by its inciting incident: the suicide of a gay Latinx porn actor and closeted trans woman that rattles the industry. The novel follows two characters, Pedro and Jeff, in the aftermath of this loss. Both are aging porn stars struggling to adapt to a gentrifying San Francisco, an ever-evolving queer culture, and unsatisfying relationships. 

Pedro sees himself as the breadwinner for a nonbinary trophy husband, who is also a porn actor, who manages Pedro’s social media platforms, as well as his own up-to-date queer influencer channel. Through their relationship, porn scenes, and flashbacks we learn about the traumatic origins of Pedro’s queer discovery and the dark circumstances of his migration to the United States from Mexico. Pedro lives his life in fear of cancellation, as he has seen many of his peers go down for a mix of different toxicities. His precarious economic well-being depends on his reputation, and the pressure makes him act out violently periodically throughout the novel. 

Jeff, on the other hand, is reeling from a heartbreak with a closeted baseball star. While Pedro’s excellence and hotness provides him with a sense of power and purpose, Jeff’s relationship to pornography and sexuality feels more reflexive, an escape he cannot wield with discipline. Interestingly, Jeff was raised by two lesbians who hate pornography. Jeff and his parents make faint efforts to rekindle their relationship, as Jeff’s musical stardom begins to rise. Jeff’s musical allusions flood the novel, providing several playlists worth of listening material that will dizzy anyone unfamiliar with 90s rock. I spent a lot and not enough time looking up songs and listening to the soundscape they provided. Like Pedro, Jeff also violently lashes out against those who betray him. 

The novel is full of sharp observations. Porn scenes have the bawdy, campy language of porn scenes, but manage to do more than simply convey raw masculine lust. The scenes often intersect with challenges in the actors’ personal lives, frequently include complex and/or traumatic dynamics between actors and directors, and trigger devastating and soulful flashbacks. Bruciaga manages to say something heartbreaking and ugly about masculinity through these scenes. Bruciaga conveys brutality with tenderness. 

Pornografia para piromaniacos ends with pessimistic conclusions on masculinity and its toxicities. There is something about Jeff and Pedro’s many rants in the book, however, that give me a sense of hope. If the voices of aging queers continue to be silenced or disappear as times shift and their voices become inconvenient to some, the book provides a space where the voices of some of our queer elders can be heard. They provide some well-argued critiques of contemporary queer culture, even if they as characters fall victim to their own toxicities, ultimately proving themselves wrong. 

I’m on the lookout for more erotic novels this brilliant. Sex undergirds far too much of human life to not read writing about it seriously. I would love to translate it one day… it’d be a dream.  5/5  

The Volcano Daughters / Gina María Balibrera / 2024

Following the trails of Consuelo and Graciela, two daughters kidnapped from Izalco, El Salvador, The Volcano Daughters is a loving and ambitious attempt to re-tell Salvadoran history for the Salvadoran diaspora. In many ways, I feel like this book was written specifically for me, as a Salvadoran poet interested in Central American history. It takes as its backdrop the single biggest moment of historic trauma for Salvadorans outside of la conquista, which is of course La Matanza of 1932 where between 10k to 50k (depends on what scholarship you subscribe to) mostly indigenous folks were murdered in a couple of weeks. The novel manages to encapsulate Salvadoran history from the memories of indigo plantations in the 19th century to about the 1950s. I am not exaggerating when I say this novel will probably save young Salvadorans a decade of serious study in the sheer quantity of allusions it gathers and arranges into a coherent narrative. 

The Volcano Daughters opens with a preamble of sorts, describing the importance and perspective of the story, quite reminiscent of Junot Diaz’s opening chapter to The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Here, we become acquainted with one of Balibrera’s most genius storytelling devices, namely she uses the ghosts of young massacred girls, kin of our protagonists Consuelo and Graciela, as part interlocutor, part muse, in telling the story. The story is channeled explicitly through the author, Gina Balibrera, by these ghosts. The ghosts then interrupt the narrative, sometimes with shady commentary, other times contesting the story with their own biases, and sometimes even critiquing the author’s own language. This is a powerful and useful device that allows Balibrera the opportunity of dipping into debates about Salvadoran history and literature. 

The Volcano Daughters is peppered with allusions to literature, history, and scholarship by or about Salvadorans. A lot of these asides are astute and apt interventions, such as when the ghosts interrupt an allusion to Roque Dalton to point out that he had a sexual relationship with the underage daughter of a comrade, something that Salvadoran literati and academia have not grappled with seriously yet because it is really inconvenient to have a figure as important and beloved to our leftist history as Roque be guilty of such a heinous act. This is one of the many necessary feminist interventions to our understanding of our own history. 

Other times, however, I believe these asides are largely distracting. As much as I am curious about Balibrera’s criticisms of Joan Didion, her memoir Salvador literally falls outside the timeline of The Volcano Daughters. I’m ultimately only interested in the critique because I’m into Central American studies and even then, I’m not sure I got much out of that rant. If I wasn’t aware of Joan Didion, I wouldn’t have even picked up that it was her work being critiqued, as many of these allusions happen obliquely. Roque Dalton, for example, isn’t even mentioned by name. While one can argue that it’s up to the reader to do the research and study up to fully appreciate the work, I think putting this much of an onus is a tad ridiculous. As someone who has gone out of their way to study more Salvadoran history than most people I know in the diaspora, even I was sure I was missing out on crucial context for some of these asides, especially when it came to the conversations within the European art scene. These at times confusing allusions do, of course, present me with the opportunity to research and study more, but it definitely bogged down the narrative and wasn’t as effective at delivering such a critique as another forum or form may have been. 

There is a trend right now of powerful, headstrong, reactive Latinas in Latina literature right now, who respond surprisingly boldly in violent confrontations. I’m thinking of Betita in Land of Cranes who tries to fight against ICE officers as a nine-year-old. I’m thinking of Tia Tere in my own collection where she assaults a thief, as she did in real life, and later when I imagine her landing a punch against a military officer, which she didn’t do in real life. In The Volcano Daughters, for example, one of the ghosts punches a military officer that later massacres her and the family; later on, Graciela stabs the 1930s-40s equivalent of ICE in Hollywood before fleeing. The latter example, especially, felt not very well thought out narratively, requiring a deus ex machina where Graciela flees following the ghosts as butterflies, somehow doesn’t get caught despite being in front of a Hollywood filming crew, and disappears in the Bay Area. Of course, Latinas are strong and powerful, many do resist, sometimes violently, against their oppressors, and we deserve to see that represented. But I’m not always convinced by the characterization of these headstrong women. They feel a bit more like tropes, caricatures than trauma-informed portrayals of real people. In a similar vein, I struggled with the voice of the novel at times. The amount of puchica’s was heartwarming and familiar, sure, but I feel like the characters are sometimes too easy to caricaturize. My own family says puchica, but not that much. 

The story is propelled sometimes successfully, sometimes less so, by the drama of the era. Knowing La Matanza is coming in Salvador and the Nazis are coming in Europe creates some good narrative tension, but sometimes the question of why we were still following the characters through their lives lingered, especially as they meandered through their new lives. As a whole, The Volcano Daughters definitely succeeded in capturing the struggles of Salvadoran women in this era, as Graciela and Consuelo fumble through their trauma, romantic relationships, childbirth, racialized expectations of their behavior and careers as artists, etc. In this way, the novel succeeds dramatically and beautifully, even if it occasionally steers away from its focus.

All that said, I treasure this novel and look forward to gifting it to my loved ones, teaching it in a course one day, and otherwise uplifting it.

4 out of 5. 

My Top 10 Albums of 2024

1) The Past is Still Alive / Hurray for the Riff Raff / 2024

Because I grew up around a lot of rich, racist country-loving folks, I’ve had a lot of trouble sinking into good folk and country my whole life. I never thought 2024 would be the year folk and country albums would dominate my listening for long stretches. Hurray for the Riff Raff is the culmination of this new turn for me. A queer boricua cowgirl crooning about fentanyl, love, and highways, Hurray for the Riff Raff frequently pushed my despair into the sublime, transforming my grief into nostalgia. The first song “Alibi” reminds me of the worst times of my life, but not the terror and sickness, but the love of friends like Gionni Ponce during those times. These songs convince me to love, to dream, to try against the odds.      

Favorite Lyric: I used to think I was born into the wrong generation. But now I know I made it right on time to watch the world burn with a tear in my eye to watch the world burn I’m right on time. 

2) I DREAMT I FOUND A RED RUBY - Francesca Wexler - 2024

Francesca Wexler’s music makes me feel like my most beautiful, intelligent, and heavy self. Top-notch pen game with a complex range of queer emotions on lush beats. The music feels like the best sort of edible high in the summer sun. I literally feel warmer when I listen to it. This was my soundtrack for the entire summer, including my trip to Guatemala and El Salvador where I fulfilled my lifelong dream of reading the book I wrote on my mother’s life in the homeland surrounded by loved ones and comrades. 

Favorite Lyric: All my angels work the night shift. 

3) GNX - Kendrick Lamar - 2024 

It’s painful to watch so much of hip-hop culture be saturated with rappers’ lowest vibrations, completely self-abandoned to gluttony, amorality, egoism, and horrifyingly bad politics. Kendrick’s presence in the culture this year felt like a rare voice of authority trying to carve out a pocket in the culture where bangers and reason could co-exist. I was surprised by how much the fury and hatred he unleashed during the beef spoke to my own frustrations with the US at large and how much I needed that release valve. As ugly as the beef got, it was incredibly impressive to watch Kendrick remain grounded and emerge a fuller artist. GNX is some of my favorite Kendrick for its playfulness and groundedness. 

Favorite Lyric: Starting to see spaceships on Rosecrans. I see the aliens hold hands. They wanna see me do my dance.     

4) Lonestar Luchador - That Mexican OT - 2023

That Mexican OT feels like the first true heir of Big Pun’s legacy. That Mexican OT combines mariachi chillidos with Pun-level wordplay in a classic Texas country lean. Lonestar Luchador is brilliantly crafted with hilarious Ralph Barbosa skits and conceptually tight-knit songs that dive between bravado, trauma-dumping, and just pure fun.   

Favorite Lyric: I had to congratulate her parents cuz they made em a bad bitch. 

5) DEIRA - Saint Levant - 2024 

Rapping and singing in English, French, and Arabic, Saint Levant is the Palestinian lover boy you didn’t know you needed in your life. Because who said surviving and resisting a genocide can’t be sexy af. These dreamy tunes made my Chicago summer days magic, without asking me to stick my head in the sand either. Thank you to Lin Flores for turning me onto this. 

Favorite lyric: I hear the sounds of the bombs in our sleep, but I never in my life heard the sound of defeat. 

6) Dark Times - Vince Staples - 2024

Vince Staples deserves just as much love as Kendrick.  I think he is who people think J. Cole is. This is spiritual psychedelic rap, the album ending with a woman’s vision of the universe’s slow struggle to the perfection of our souls. I love Vince because he has a way of holding the agony of living and making it bearable, his calm steady voice slowly sinking into your subconscious. I don’t typically find his songs catchy, but after a few listens, I get hooked by the feeling and the space it opens in me to feel peace. This album traverses all sorts of heartbreak with ten toes planted in the concrete.

Favorite lyric: I don’t need your flowers, I’m living. The first time I saw a million dollars I squinted.  

7) Few Good Things - Saba - 2022

Saba taught me how to move through a Chicago winter with this album. The soundscape couldn’t fit the city better. The project dropped in 2022 when I was distracted by JID, Pusha T, and Amindi. I’m glad I returned to it though because this album is every bit as worthy and incredible as those three. Dominated by blue-gray soundscapes and gritty lyrics about how weird it is to survive and thrive in a burning world, Saba’s growth in this project is incredible. 

Favorite Lyric: I got everything I could ever need / and i try to keep that in mind / whenever i meet a man trying to sell a dream

8) Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying - Labi Siffre - 1972

December 2023 I crash land in India full of PTSD symptoms and the shock of the move to Chicago still fresh on my nervous system. Labi was a crucial part of my healing as I cherished the unimaginably cool moments with my new family, ate delectable food, and fell deeper in love with Anushka. I listened to Labi while practicing a difficult set of new qi gong movements and breathing through the pain. The opening song allowed me to enter a space of reverence with my loves and losses, and the rest splayed playfully out, setting me up for my year of exploring folksier sounds. Shoutout to the student who turned me onto the project. 

Favorite Lyric: I am free man and my father he was a slave. I have been broken but my children will be saved. Saved for the fire of man’s desire. Saved for tomorrow with today’s sorrow. Saved for a Jesus who does not need us. Saved for the lovers I pray they will discover.  

9) Chromokopia - Tyler, the Creator - 2024

Tyler’s paranoia-packed album came just in time to shake me out of my fear of the ever-rising tide of fascism with lyrics that are equal parts soulful and mischievous. It’s great to hear Tyler be his whole queer self on such energetic production.

Favorite lyric: give a fuck bout pronouns, I’m that n**** and that bitch. 

10) Hells Welles - Jesse Welles - 2024 

I found Jesse Welles through his song about the assassination of the UnitedHealth CEO, and his politically sharp folk with biting satiric lyrics has won me over so powerfully, he slid into this last spot in the final minute. He’s equally capable of making me seethe, laugh, and cry with croons that are equally soulful and goofy. He has a whole album on nature, giving odes to bugs, trees, and whales and two others making political commentary on everything from the genocide, cancer, modern-day slavery, and more. I’m just happy to have found someone as angry and silly as I feel most days. 

Favorite lyric: the dead don’t feel honor, they don’t feel that brave. They don’t feel avenged. They’re lucky if they got graves. 

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order)

La Isla - Rels B 

Mind Blade - Malev da Shinobi 

Antitesis - YoungShiva

Cowboy Carter - Beyonce

Please Don’t Cry - Rapsody

If My Wife New, I’d be Dead - CMAT

Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going - Shaboozey

Alligator Bites Never Heal - Doechii 

Javelin - Sufjan Stevens 

The Long Game - Marlon Craft 

Gangs of Zion / Ron Stallworth / 2024

Gangs of Zion / Ron Stallworth / 2024

I read this book at the recommendation of a former colleague for a Utah-related project of mine. From the author and subject of Black Klansmen, the book and the film, we have a follow-up project fleshing out his career as a gang unit police investigator and the so-called hip-hop cop in (drumroll) Utah of all places.

Stallworth begins this memoir with a hamfisted rebuttal of Boots Riley. For those unaware, when the BlackKklansmen rollout began, Riley released a forceful critique of BlackKklansmen as revisionist history, copaganda, and pointed out Stallworth’s history of infiltrating radical Black organizations, including the one Riley’s father was a part of, as part of COINTELPRO. Stallworth fixates one aspect of Riley’s blistering and effective critique: turns out, Stallworth was too young to have participated in COINTELPRO. He definitely DID take part in infiltrating radical Black organizations, just not under the behest of the FBI. Stallworth lambasts Riley for this factual inaccuracy, completely missing the thrust of Riley’s critique. Everyone I love and care about would consider this a minor hiccup in Riley’s critique, since Stallworth did in fact break up radical Black orgs. 

For his part, Stallworth justifies infiltrating these organizations using explicitly anti-communist rhetoric and claiming they were a threat to national security. To the surprise of no one, a cop is a cop. What was mildly surprising and thoroughly entertaining was Stallworth’s confession to physically assaulting Riley at a dinner, where he boasts of squeezing his hand too hard and holding him hostage by squeezing a pressure point on his neck. Later on, he describes patting Riley’s back and telling him he just used the bathroom and didn’t wash his hands. He literally brags about making Riley “my bitch.” The moments reveal just how disgusting, insecure, and brute Stallworth’s masculinity is. What a weird little clown! 

The first bit of Stallworth’s memoir details his rise in the police department and the emergence of his “Black consciousness.” We see Stallworth refuse to tokenize himself in moments and opportunistically tokenize himself in other moments. He’s clearly a bullheaded person with a high tolerance for external criticism and disapproval as both his Black community and the officers on the force didn’t really like him much, it seems. He relates to Malcolm X, but never bothered learning the history of policing or thinking critically about solving societal problems, so he’s completely bought into the prison industrial complex as our best option it seems. 

There are two worthwhile histories described in this book. The first is the history of the JobCorps in Utah. Stallworth focuses in on this federal program, which took low-income, high-risk youth from major cities like LA and brought them to suburban Utah for job skills training, because JobCorps brought gang culture to Utah. Utah officials were in denial of this, because JobCorps stimulated their economies with fat federal checks to administer the program. In my opinion, the JobCorps also likely increased the racism of Utahns by making some of the few people of color visible in their communities, some of the poorest and in need in the country. Of course, their presence brought social problems that proliferate among any historically oppressed working class and racialized youth. For his part, Stallworth provides a sturdy critique of how the program was administered that actually shows a deep concern for these youth. It’s hilarious to learn more about white, Mormon gangsters of Utah committing petty crimes and aggravating to learn about the Pacific Islander Mormons swept up into gang culture as a reprieve from a racist society. Stallworth rebuts criticisms of his profiling of youth of color by providing anecdotes of families crying racism when they had proven gang ties and never by describing actual data and letting us know what his profile looked like. Overall, this is socially complicated territory, where actual racism is certainly at play, as well as actual violent criminal activity in some communities of color at the time. Stallworth’s voice and bias here is useful, even if I disagree with him, in painting the larger picture of what was happening in Utah’s lower income community at times. For his part, Stallworth genuinely went out of his way to do what he thought was right in revealing the way JobCorps was failing both youth  of color and the communities these youth were brought to. 

The second history tied into this one is the rise of gangster rap and its influence on youth. During the hysterical pearl-clutching of the Ice T, NWA, and Tupac era, Stallworth gained a reputation as a so-called “hip-hop cop,” where he would rap and breakdown rap lyrics in universities and serve as an expert witness in the “Gangster Rap Made Me Do It” cases. I listened with troubled curiosity about how Stallworth claims to have learned the “G-code” by listening to gangster rap. He became a fan of 90s gangsta rap, falling hard to Tupac’s consciousness in songs like “Dear Mama’ and “Brenda’s got a baby.” During this era, Stallworth became a N-word-whisperer for scared white people and elites. His representations of hip-hop culture were sympathetic, as he saw gangster rappers as expressing the genuine concerns of an oppressed community. He defended hip-hop culture in courtrooms and warned politicians against culture wars that simply made gangster rap cooler. While I agree that Stallworth’s experience as a cop, a Black man, and a fan of hip-hop, who self-studied sociology and ethnic studies to better understand the culture, give him some insight in the gang culture and communities of color, I believe these experiences gave him too much confidence. He acts as if hip-hop culture can substitute actually getting to know people. His relationship with community remains antagonistic, even in his somewhat believable anecdotes about former gang members saying he was the only positive male role model in their life. Even if these anecdotes were true, a handful of anecdotes hardly compare to the many other lives he likely ruined and made much more difficult in his role.  

Even when Stallworth is dead wrong, he still manages to be entertaining. 3 out of 5.

[...] / Fady Joudah / 2024

[...] / Fady Joudah / 2024

I would highly recommend reading […] in a book club or group. Being a Palestinian writer in 2024 means the genocide and your familiar struggles being thrust into the spotlight like never before, alongside all the political baggage and expectations that come with such a moment. Here, Joudah resists becoming a sole spokesperson, someone who sentimentalizes or serves as a catalyst for catharsis. Inevitably, this has created a collection that can be hard to parse on your own at times. There’s a resistance in the silences here, in the naming of so many poems as […] in a way that makes some of the poems harder to remember, much in the same way the onslaught of death and the faces and the dismembered body parts on our screen become lost to actual memory. It was reading these poems in conversation with peers that really made their brilliance shine through for me. i had the blessing of having a Palestinian woman in the room during my book club who could speak to how certain poems evoke a specific set of war memories for her. I particularly adored the maqams in this collection. I recommend folks to listen to Joudah read “Dedication”—what I would argue is the most “accessible” poem in the collection and the sort of poem people expected and wanted from Palestinian poets this year. Joudah reads it with a rhythm and energy practically foreign to the loud, slammy US circuit for poems like these. 4.5/5

Bluff / Danez Smith / 2024

Bluff / Danez Smith / 2024

Danez Smith been one of my favorite poets. In Bluff, they reflect on their meteoric rise and the tokenism that they tried and feels they failed to resist. In some of their best poems yet, they criticize the “hope industrial complex” and feel embarrassed about having written poems for presidents. I laughed out loud at the line “they untapped my phone / found no threat, the shame i felt.” Despite this, Electric Literature still insists Smith “Sculpts Pessimism into Hope”, which isn’t exactly wrong but feels like it misses the critique, as if readers can’t stomach the Afropessimism intrinsic in the project. I can’t say I’m well-read in Afro-pessimism, but as a neophyte to Marxism, I did feel disappointed in Smith’s inability to articulate much of a vision throughout the collection. The poem “principles” is particularly underwhelming: it argues against “all lives matter” as if Smith is trapped in some racist white woman’s facebook page; it puts its most radical position--a desire for a stateless society--into parentheticals, not giving it much space to breathe and develop meaningfully. No doubt Smith’s life as a poz nonbinary Black artist has not been an easy one, but still, Smith has been granted lots of money and time and connections to develop their ideas and be heard, so it’s a bit disappointing to read poems from a dude in their 30s still writing about “three soulmates” that they lost. The essay “My End of the World” about BIPOC relationships to nature, for example, merely seemed to catalog introductory talking points of Black and brown environmental thought. The highs in Bluff are great, but Danez sets a high bar for themself and at times I feel like they gets lost in the sauce, flinching when they could choose to grow into new territory.    

Coz / Marco Valerio Reyes Cisfuentes / 2023

Coz / Marco Valerio Reyes Cisfuentes / 2023

Marco and I traded books during the Trinacional festival de poesia in Chiquimula, where he wore #BlackLivesMatter and Pride shirts in even the most conservative settings, where he was told not to read the poem about the war criminal who funded one of the private schools. Most poetry collections I have read primarily about death sink into the sentimental. You can read the minor scale in the writing, the moaning grief. Coz writes about death with a punk’s stoicism and probing eye. In “Oda al Arbol” or “Ode to the Tree,” he laments the “cowardly act of writing,” wrestling with the fear of expression in the aftermath of a dictatorship. In “Ultima Voluntad” or “Last Will,” he reflects upon the visions of his dying father. Coz is a chapbook for those unafraid of looking the world in the eye, of noticing the cadavers they prefer we ignore. 5/5 

The American Gun / Jessica Femiani / 2024

The American Gun / Jessica Femiani / 2024

I traded books with Jessica when I visited Oneonta in October. The American Gun is a cutting chapbook about gun violence in the United States. I can’t say the collection taught me anything new. We have lived through and remember each of the mass shootings and massacres described in this collection. The collection doesn’t make me look at them in a new light. Femiani doesn’t aestheticize the loss. Rather, reading them altogether, spoken so plainly, really hammers in the incomprehensible amount of violence we have allowed to become normal. Femiani’s chapbook attempts to un-numb the US soul. I read it by a pond reflecting the red and yellow autumn leaves, after having a challenging conversation with a guilt-ridden Zionist who thanked me for teaching a poem by Black Jewish poet Aaron Samuels during a workshop. I, like Femiani’s book, don’t have clear answers to how to defeat the newest wave of fascist-terrorist violence. I struggled with my numbness as I read the collection. I thank Femiani for making me struggle against it. 3 out of 5. 

Más allá de la aureola marrón y núbil / Lauri Garcia Duenas / 2024

Más allá de la aureola marrón y núbil / Lauri Garcia Duenas / 2024

Más allá de la aureola marrón y núbil is an afternoon and evening spent with your sweet and timeworn tia, gracious in her wisdom and resplendent in her power. “Quiero sanar pero eso implicaría estar enferma / y no lo estoy / ni lo estuve,” she says with her whole chest in the opening poem. Alexandra Regalado translates it as “I want to heal but that implies being sick / and I am not/ nor was I ever.” The bitter ex club listening to Rebeca Lane’s latest project with Audry Funk will enjoy Lauri’s curses for her betrayer, but what I love about Lauri’s approach is that rather than vengefully lashing out, she has truly found her center; her curses come from a place of conviction rather than fantasy, creating a voice that feels less like a chest-thumping bitter ex and more believable: “no hay odio ni rencor en la aureola marrón y núbil / sólo leche para mi segundo vástago” or in translation: “There is no hate or resentment in the nubile brown areola / only milk for my second child.” This collection was a hug when I needed it. 4.5/5   

Soledades / Sol Quetzalli / 2024

Soledades / Sol Quetzalli / 2024

Sol Quetzalli is a Salvadoran poet and professor of literature who I traded books with in Chiquimula. Her chapbook Soledades captures grief and absence and cages it in iron bars like a haunted loro. You can find her read from the collection during Slam Quetzal here, where she took first place with a voice trembling with emotions. Her work reminds me of Cynthia Guardado at her finest, only in Spanish. The poems here grieve the death of her mother, the rampant murders, and the loss of innocence of a dystopian Salvador drenched in blood. 4 out 5 

The Town of Babylon / Alejandro Varela / 2022

The Town of Babylon / Alejandro Varela / 2022

I read this because of the suggestion of a Salvadoran literary scholar, and I regret every second I spent with this book. Within the first pages, a queer latinx man decides to go to his 20-year high school reunion, practically ensuring I would share no common ground with a character I was ostensibly supposed to find relatable. The character shares a myriad of lukewarm political and cultural opinions of an emotionally stunted man of color with little insight to offer. One of my friend’s peers said of this book: Only a man could write a coming-of-age novel at the age of 40. I couldn’t agree more. 1/5  

Inventario de mis musas / Laura Ruiz / 2022

Inventario de mis musas / Laura Ruiz / 2022

These poems are written under the pressure of undocumented motherhood and you can feel it. Lines race to the edge of the page as poems burn through difficulties and desires. It feels reminiscent of America is in the Heart or sad girl poems. Standout poems like Spanglish manage to tie themselves up cleanly, but this is a messier, rawer collection that doesn’t have time for that nonsense. 3 out of 5. 

Poemas de la izquierda erotica / Ana Maria Rodas / 1973

Poemas de la izquierda erotica / Ana Maria Rodas / 1973

Poemas de la izquierda erotica is considered the beginning of feminist leftist literature in Guatemala. It's a spicy title, but even so, I think I’d be forgiven for expecting a little bit more leftist content or analysis here. The collection includes a mix of poems about erotic desire and agency, both of which are frequently frustrated by dishonesty, rejection, or other unbalanced gendered power dynamics. The poems have Yesika Salgado’s accessibility, line breaks, and flair for unflinching honesty ground through the political upheavals of the Central American armed conflicts of the Cold War. I found the poems thoroughly delightful, though would consider it a nascent feminist literature coming from an era when the bar for men was so low and the asks of women were respectively really damn low too. 4/5

Promise / Rachel Eliza Griffiths / 2023

Promise / Rachel Eliza Griffiths / 2023

I read Promise with To Kill a Mockingbird in my head. Both are written from the perspective of a girl in the Jim Crow South, struggling to understand the social complexities of violence as racially charged incidents embroil their hometowns. What Rachel Eliza Griffiths manages to capture, however, is infinitely more soulful, weathered, and gritty. 

Promise opens with a tricky scene where three young girls, two Black sisters and one white friend, explore one another’s vulvas in a non-sexual manner--a classic I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours--. The reader is immediately thrust into a world where the intricacies of race, gender, and queerness can be traced through their reactions. 

Promise is a coming-of-age story of these three girls as their dreams collide against the barriers erected by a society that hates women. As such, Griffiths doesn’t sidestep the humanity of any of them. This is particularly impressive in the case of the white girl Ruby, who eventually lashes out with slurs and worse as her friendship with the two sisters devolves. The reader witnesses how Ruby’s unstable family life damaged her sense of self and the way white society and teachers preyed on her vulnerabilities. Ruby’s class background and shattered home is in stark contrast to the Kindred sisters’, who come from a strong Black family with an educated father. Griffiths narrates the process of Ruby slowly accepting the racial bribe through her class ascendency, rising from her ragged clothes to clothes purchased with stolen money to ribbons gifted to her by her predatory female teacher and mentor. Griffiths narrates--through the Black sisters at times--how Ruby was essentially bought and purchased, commodified by her white teachers and family, in painful detail. This close attention to Ruby is one of the novel’s greatest strengths, an immeasurable act of love to what easily could have been a cliched villainous character and an act that illuminated how gender, race, and class collide to hurt and manipulate people like Ruby. 

The story of the Kindreds, on the other hand, tells a story Black folks tell often: the story of what it meant to survive in the Jim Crow south. It’s a difficult story to tell for a variety of reasons: the intergenerational trauma, the politics behind any telling, the cliches of the genre. Griffiths somehow managed to tell it in a way that felt fresh to me. She puts the reader alongside Ezra and Cinthy, the two young Black sisters, as they resist and stumble their way through their racist school system and society and watch an emerging civil rights movement brew from afar. I especially cherish the dialogue between older generations and these two young girls as elders tried to guide them through a survival that did not compromise their dignity but would keep them safe from racial violence and terror. The sisters and their family survive and lose a lot. In the process, readers have the gift of witnessing the power of Black love, how it can even survive and nourish a family after a death. I love Promise for its willingness to show some elders’ sloppiness through survival and healing, as the last quarter of the novel introduces a vulgar grandmother who is called in to help during a time of crisis. The attention to the grandmother’s story, as well as Ruby’s for that matter, help Promise not fall into the traps of respectability politics. Ezra, in particular, is forced to engage with her own biases and learn to respect--with boundaries--a more rugged part of her literal history. 

Promise is so fully wrought and so magnificently intimate that I loved it against my will. I admit, I picked up the book out of loyalty to Rachel Eliza Griffiths and wasn’t sure if I needed another story from within this particular era of Black history. It quieted and instructed me, even when like Ezra and Cinthy, I wanted to rebel against it. So reader, sit your ass down and study it. Rachel has an important story to tell. 5/5

Dialect of Distant Harbors / Dipika Mukherjee / 2022

Dialect of Distant Harbors / Dipika Mukherjee / 2022

Despite a pen trained in craft, Mukherjee’s writing fails to find its rhythm in this collection. I had Anushka read a couple of poems to make sure I wasn’t just untrained in picking up the rhythms of a more Indian English, and she couldn’t make it through them. While Mukherjee picks complex material, she doesn’t have enough of a vision to say anything too profound about them in this collection. I read on despite Anushka’s suggestion that my time was better spent elsewhere. 1.5/5 

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 / Eman Abdelhadi and M E O'Brien / 2023

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 / Eman Abdelhadi and M E O'Brien / 2023

In Everything for Everyone, the authors take an ambitious and promising premise and fumble it. The novel frames itself as an oral history project of an era in human history where crucial aspects of capitalism finally collapse and critical advancements to communism finally occur. The subjects of the interview are selected to provide a window into how particular aspects of this new world came to be or were experienced by someone who lived them. 

As someone unread in many utopian novels, perhaps my eye is simply too critical of genre staples or a larger conversation happening. However, the conversations contained in the book irked me just as much as they managed to tickle my brain in an exciting direction. Take, for example, the interview with a scientist who worked on rehabilitating environments devastated by climate change. In the conversation, there is a mention of biotech, which refers to genetically engineered fauna and animals designed to restore balance to an ecosystem. What a lovely can of worms! What a great opportunity to explore the challenges of this Sci-Fi technology through a conversation, right? Wrong. They sidestep biotech in the interview, leaving me head-scratching about the missed opportunity and whether the authors are tempted by the idea of biotech, which to me at least feels obviously dangerous in key ways. 

At other times, Everything for Everyone just reads as naive. Take, for example, the chapter on the liberation of Palestine that centers on nonviolent action. The book was written and published before the Hamas attack on 10/7/23, so I can’t blame the authors too much, but I felt my trust in the authors dwindle repeatedly after similarly naive moves. Take, for example, the interview about birth work. In the commune, family structure dissolved and communal care arrangements for children were figured out. Technology had advanced to the point that AMAB people could carry a child, and supposedly many were rushing to experience that. While I’m sure some men would take on the burden, the starry eyed way this portion is narrated just felt silly. 

Maybe I’m a pessimist but the chapters I valued the most were the most traumatized and dark. There’s an interview with a Native American veteran who describes fighting in a nuclear war against Iran. There’s another with a survivor of a far-right Christian cult state compound. The characters and the situations felt truer. Even then though, the narratives skips through some of the most interesting parts: the veteran is so traumatized he can’t narrate coherently and the survivor of the cult is so traumatized they skip the most exciting bits of the escape. 

Everything for Everyone may be a cooler book to discuss than to read, but even so, I’m mostly just left with disappointment at how cool this book could’ve been in sturdier hands. 2.5/5. 

Entre los brazos de la neblina / Mariela Tax / 2023

Entre los brazos de la neblina / Mariela Tax / 2023

These plainspoken poems thread the realities of one contemporary Maya woman. The poems narrate cultural connection and loss, clap back against racism, linger on haunting mountainous landscapes, and cut through the fog with a clear sweet light in her voice. I found many 5/5 poems in this collection with my favorites being the punchier, longer poems like “la evolucion de mis pasos.” 3 / 5