Imaginary Borders / Xiuhtezcatl Martinez / 2020

Imaginary Borders / Xiuhtezcatl Martinez / 2020

In 63 short pages, Martinez attempts to convince everyone, but especially youth and perhaps especially especially youth of color, to get involved in the environmental activism. What drew me to the book was Martinez’s blunt, no bullshit language and the hip-hop lean in his voice. What kept me there was his clear-eyed understanding of the challenges facing our planet, the solutions available, and the facts and research to back things up. In particular, Martinez writes a sharp argument for the urgent need to include people of color on the front lines of the movement. As someone who has spent the past year understand what intellectual traditions keep people of color out of environmental canons and programs and how writers and artists of color have contributed to the fight against climate change, I deeply appreciate Martinez punchy contribution. Written with urgency and in a casual conversational tone, Imaginary Borders is a perfect text for distracted and disillusioned teenagers. I recommend this book for environmentalists, young adults, and anyone interested in hip-hop activism.

I give this book a 3.5/5

As a side note, Xiuhtezcatl also raps. Their latest album is worth a listen and their discography fits cleanly alongside folks like Rebel Diaz, Logic, Flobots, Frank Waln, and other rappers joined by positivity and wokeness.

Virga & Bone / Craig Childs / 2019

Virga & Bone / Craig Childs / 2019

I first encountered the work of Craig Childs at Star Hall in Moab, Utah. The room was packed with locals hanging on his every word, especially as he described the rapturous beauty of flying through a virga. My partner was so impressed by his passion that she bought a copy of his book. While she was getting it signed, she mentioned she was a PhD student in Literature and a bashful Childs told her he wrote the book very, very hastily and to please not judge him too harshly. After reading Virga & Bone, all I have to say is if this isn’t Childs in top form, then Child’s other books must be bomb-ass. A true romanticist, his writing swells and sighs over our landscape. A snappy read, the language glides beneath your eyes like a magic carpet. Childs speaks with the voice of someone eroded, but not hardened by desert. He speaks with a blunt wisdom about its dangers and risks, but also with undeniable and infectious love. At the event, Childs talked about how his real aim in writing is not to make people read, but to make people go out to reverently, ecstatically experience the wonders of the Southwest on their own. His books are only supposed to hold you down while you wait for your next excursion, as most of us can’t live a nomadic life backpacking across our sparse, sparkling deserts.

Another aspect of the book I appreciate is Child’s understanding of the history of the land. He weaves in bits of Navajo language and culture without stereotyping or exoticizing. Neither does it feel like he is speaking over or for Navajos or other indigenous groups. Reflecting on his relationship to the land, he argues, “If there was ever an illegal alien, I felt like one. I was walking over histories as if the earth was the only history, an error of arrogance and blindness I didn’t know I had… I’d been speaking it thinking myself a prince, an explorer. Now I was exploring the trenches of a canyon looking for the way out.” While I cringed at the word “illegal alien,” I appreciate his gesture of acknowledging how his whiteness shaped his relationship with the land and how part of the work of knowing this land is knowing its history beyond European colonialism. Later on, Childs speaks of the Southwest as an “exchange route”, a “Silk Road of North America.” In describing the history of the landscape, he names the atrocities, the “children in cages,” “murdered women,” and “concentration camps.” Childs uses the Southwest’s history as a counterargument against harsh and strict immigration policy. “Ask any shell trader a thousand years ago and they’d tell you that blocking the flow in a place like this will be a problem,” Childs reminds us. For someone who manages to stay otherwise politically neutral, I deeply appreciate these clear-eyed gestures.

If you love the outdoors, you’ll love Childs work.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in Utah, non-fiction, environmentalism, and deserts.

A History of Kindness by Linda Hogan / 2020

Coming in at a whopping 137 pages of poetry, Linda Hogan’s latest collection A History of Kindness looks like a daunting read. Any expectation of density or convolution that contemporary poetry is notorious for swiftly fades away as your ear rests on the clarity and cadence of Hogan’s words. In many ways, A History of Kindness feels like a majestic book, both in its length and its sweeping perspective. Hogan’s words are laden with a history that gives monumental weight to the simplest of images. In “We Used to Have Pearls,” look at how much meaning is given to pearls in the first three stanzas:

I once asked Old Mother what became of the pearls / that decorated our oldest roofs.

She said the Spanish stole them in bags too heavy / to carry. Some of our pearls spilled over.

But in truth it was their own souls they carried. / No longer did they shine.

In three short stanzas, we get an images of ancient ancestral pearls, the historic trauma of conquest, and a reinterpretation of what humanity and dignity mean in the face of loss and defeat. The Chickasaw kept their souls through their defeat, the Spanish did not in their victory.

Hogan’s words find strength in softness. Whether remembering a joyful moment wading in the water with loved ones (as in “Recuerdo”) or interrogating the moment when a police officer kills yet another Black man (as in “Tulsa”), Hogan asks the reader to slow down, to embrace the pace of her line breaks, all of which break on moments of breath at logical points in the sentence. In contrast to the explosive bombast of Natalie Diaz’s work, Hogan’s poetry isn’t pretentious or enamored with its own form.

Hogan’s documentation of the kindness, that of loved ones and animals, is a much needed medicine for the present moment. In a time dominated by grief, illness, chaos, confrontation, and catastrophe, Hogan reminds of not just of the sacrifices and strength of our ancestors, but also their joy and love for life. In her poem “A Need for Happiness,” Hogan shifts from describing the havoc wreaked by Buffalo Bill, the trauma of starvation and the near extinction of buffalo, to remembering “Those great leaders, even with grief, / they laughed together at night / when the light-bearded man left. / They talked and laughed together. // They still loved life, / so why don’t you?”

This book held me through many days when I needed an embrace to hold back the hopelessness and fatalism. I worked my way through this book slowly, much slower than I usually read poetry books, which is voraciously. There is a spaciousness to Hogan’s language, a matriarchal authority in her voice, that can’t be crafted, only gifted after years of wonder and worse.

I recommend this book for fans of Ada Limon, Mary Oliver, Ross Gay, and Alberto Rios. I recommend it to those interested in Native American literature, environmental literature, and contemporary poetics.

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

Postcolonial Love Poem / Natalie Diaz / Graywolf Press / 2020

One of my favorite things about Natalie Diaz’s poetry and celebrity is how much it seems to rub some of the older poets I know wrong. One older Native poet, for example, believes When My Brother Was An Aztec was published too soon. According to them, the manuscript felt too much like an MFA thesis—with its trumpeting play and virtuoso with forms, which to them felt like mere exercises. Another older queer poet went out of their way to comment, “[Diaz] isn’t that great” in a way to suggest not that Diaz isn’t good, just that she’s not as amazing as her celebrity would make it seem.

Maybe these poets are right, but I think the things they would fault about Diaz are the precise reasons why I love her work. I love that When My Brother Was An Aztec stunts on em with ghazals, pantoums, and the like. I love that Postcolonial Love Poem feels overwritten, that it makes me reach for the dictionary time and time again for words as thicc as atman, cabochon, lapidary, alarum, mullion, and transom. Perhaps these are things that would make me side-eye other poets, but in Diaz, there is something so deliberate and authoritative about her voice, her political framing of her own work, that makes me fall for her. While it isn’t the primary or sole reason I love Diaz’s work, I confess, part of the reason I like the high-diction of her work is because it probably makes old white people reach for the dictionary.

If you have yet to fall for Natalie Diaz, try Postcolonial Love Poem. As unabashedly erotic and deftly political as its title would imply, the collection includes intensely sexual poems, flooding over with ecstasy (“Like Church,” “Ink-Light”, and “Ode to the Beloved’s Hips” being my favorite), poems about grief, race, her brother’s drug addiction, basketball, and the environment. These poems are all densely related to the body, which—per the seven-page prose poem “The First Water Is the Body”—extends beyond Western notions of arm, leg, leg, arm, head to also conceive of the land and water as equally, if not more important parts of the body.

My favorite line is from the last poem “Grief Work”: “Achilles chased Hektor around the walls / of Ilium three times--: how long must I circle / the high gate / between her hip and knee / to sold the red-gold geometry / of her thigh?” Ugh.

Poems like “Grief Work,” like “Like Church,” like “Postcolonial Love Poem” are as full of grief as they are with love. I don’t feel like I have anything profound to say about them, just that as a grief-bound queer person of color, I am grateful for these love poems that hold the weight of history as tenderly as they do a lover’s waist. I am grateful that these poems can allude to wars lost and never-ending in the same swooping stanza where “we pleasure to hurt, leave marks / the size of stones—each cabochon polished / by our mouths.” (If you’re slow on the uptake there, she’s talking about leaving hickies.)

Postcolonial Love Poem is a must-read on your syllabus about feminism, ethnic studies, and environmentalism. Or if you’re simply looking for a hot piece of erotica to get you through the quarantine.