Now in Color / Jacqueline Balderrama / 2020
Jacqueline Balderrama is a Latina poet who will expand the boundaries of Latinx writing beyond stereotype. Now in Color dances around the issue of authenticity. Featuring a series of definition poems in Spanish, the collection attempts to build a more intimate relationship with a language that is connected yet alien to Balderrama as she wasn’t raised speaking it. As a native Spanish speaker, I don’t see myself reflected in these poems, and I don’t necessarily relate. Some of the pronunciations even feel off to me: take “ES-pear-AHN-sah” for esperanza and “ohs-COO-ro” for oscuro. But that’s besides the point. These poems are about finding magic in the Spanish language as someone who is learning it, as someone who needs the language to access parts of their home. My favorite poem in the collection is even one of these definition poems, “panza”:
After four children, her shape is lonely
for the time she is most happy.
She practices locating her core in dance—
hula and flamenco at the Senior Center
where, the youngest of the elderly, she feels like a teenager
again. In performances, my sisters and I fold back
into the ocean waves of her fingers, her hips, her shore.
Balderrama excels most in these snapshot images that slowly drip off the page. They are some of the hardest poems to write without losing your audience in a yawn. In “Some Horses,” Balderrama describes the moment when incarcerated people first meet the horses they are to care for. I never thought the city boy in me would ever find the image of “sweet-smelling blocks of hay dry in gated fields” so moving! But it is.
Throughout the collection, Balderrama tackles a series of poems about the refugee crisis at the US-Mexico border. While Balderrama’s voice probably shouldn’t be centered in these conversations above the voices of folks like Javier Zamora and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, I appreciate her series of poems revolving around immigration. Poems like “Water, 2014” are especially well-wrought and deserves to be included in the pantheon of borderlands literature.
I recommend this collection to anyone interested in poetry, Latinx literature, and writing about immigration.