Tracing the Horse / Diana Marie Delgado / 2019

Tracing the Horse (BOA Editions, September 2019) by Diana Marie Delgado

I had the blessing of reading multiple drafts of Tracing the Horse, the debut collection by Californian poet and playwright Diana Marie Delgado. There are few creatures as strong and majestic as horses. One of the most important things I know about horses in the United States, however, is that they belong to people who have way more money than Diane Delgado and me. In Delgado’s work, desire is a horse.

We first see these horses in “The Sea is Farther Than Thought,” a poem that contemplates distance and failure: “As a girl I kept suede horses / and a hairbrush inside a blond toy-box… / I kneeled every time I opened it” (19). The horses here can be read as an escape from the tumultuous environment surrounding the young girl. The girl’s kneeling almost gives the horses a sense of reverence. I also cannot help associating the horses with whiteness because of the color of the toy-box.  In “The Kind of Light I Give Off Isn’t Going to Last,” the horses become a symbol for jealousy when an estranged lover’s girlfriend has horses: “I was jealous. His girlfriend had horses (and what girl doesn’t want to come home and ride horses?)” (36). Given the fact the girlfriend can afford horses, I’m also willing to bet she’s white. Later on, the prose poem “Horses on the Radio” likewise associates horses with troubled gender dynamics in heterosexual romantic relationships (39).

Perhaps the most significant mention of horses in the entire collection, however, comes from the title poem, “Tracing the Horse”: “Maybe Mom’s the horse / because aren’t horses beautiful, / can’t they kill a man if spooked?” (23). Here, the horse signals not only womanly beauty, but also womanly strength and resistance against patriarchal violence. This assortment of horse images suggests that in Tracing the Horse horses can symbolize an idealized womanhood: one that manages to be strong, beautiful, and desirable and also one able to make itself invulnerable to the racism and machismo surrounding it. As the title of this poem and collection suggests, however, the speaker in these poems can only trace this womanhood, never quite making it incarnate.

“I like the lady horses best / how they make it all look easy,” beams Ada Limón in “How to Triumph Like a Girl,” one of the United States’ most beloved poems. Limón’s poem is one of the many examples of what prize-winning Salvadoran writer Alejandro Córdova called US poets’ Beyoncé complex. Our chest-thumping poetics of triumph, our intoxicating performances of survival, and especially our expectations of flawless womanhood. As Córdova and I zigzagged through the streets of San Salvador on his moto, we jabbed about how much we admired and emulated such fiery spunk and clapback. The high of its freedom. To be unbothered, your power undeniable. But survival rarely looks like it does in the Grammys. I listened to Lemonade every day for at least a year, but I lived “Amiga,” one of the short prose poems from Tracing the Horse:

We were in front of Kmart when I called your boyfriend

an asshole for beating you up and you told me if I said

anything bad about him again, you’d never speak to me.

Here, there are no baseball bats against the windshield, no goddess-like vengeance against the men who harmed you—there’s not even a hint of accountability. Neither the vengeance and healing found in Lemonade, nor the ease and swag of Limón’s poem are possible for Delgado’s speaker.

Tracing the Horse is cut with similar snapshots of life in La Puente, California. Throughout the collection, Delgado shows us images of the city’s want: lines where mothers wait with their children for free cheese and butter, dumpsters where cousins are caught smooching, churches where boys have so much light “plants grow towards them” (18). We find traces of her father’s addiction to heroin—another stupefying horse. One of the greatest blessings of this collection is that we as readers get to witness the speaker grow into their own in this sometimes treacherous community. “I’m older / no longer afraid / my voice, water / from a well,” says the speaker near the end of “Bridge Called Water,” a poem that captures the loss in a breaking home (33). In “Lucky You,” Delgado gifts us one of the tenderest love poems, made all the more touching by the men it has survived. In three swift sections, Delgado paints us an alternative model of survival, a sort of coming-of-age story for a young woman who never had the luxury of being young.

One of the most impressive aspects of Tracing the Horse is Delgado’s ability to create moments of intimacy across distance. In “Correspondence,” Delgado gives readers a glimpse at the adolescent snail mail between her and her brother while he was incarcerated: “Remember when the yard froze / white and Mom tied plastic over our shoes?” (54). Here, it is Delgado’s words that serve as the plastic, the fragile barrier between a loved one and the cold. “I hope you get this letter / before lights out… or have you learned to read in the dark?” writes Delgado as a touching signoff to her brother (54). Tracing the Horse is collection for those who—through necessity—learned how to read in the dark, for those who must carve moments of intimacy through the bars of a jail cell or through the walls at the border.

It may be useful to delineate Delgado’s strengths as a poet by comparing her to another woman of color poet of equal strength who writes in similar veins. In When My Brother Was An Aztec, Natalie Diaz draws scorching supernatural imagery of a drug-addled brother, all laden in metaphor and delivered with breathtaking shifts in form and virtuoso. Diaz’s work cuts like a knife. In Tracing the Horse, Delgado does not adorn her language in spectacular metaphor or braided forms; she provides snapshot after snapshot of her neighborhood and its mundane violence in a language cut clean to the bone, the glistening skeleton of a horse. You would have to look far and wide to find another collection published recently as concise, blunt, and evocative as Tracing the Horse. Particularly effective is Delgado’s use of the prose poem for short difficult scenes, where the reader is asked to grapple with the violence ubiquitous in our communities.  Delgado’s work hits like a hammer. When you read Diaz, you are listening to a calculated, dagger-eyed wordsmith. When you read Delgado, you are listening to a homegirl talk to you on her front porch on a summer night with too many moths, holding a near-empty can of cerveza. Delgado’s poetry is a phone call with a friend you have not talked to in over a year, whose voice tells you as much as her story.

This is what I admire most about Delgado’s work: her poems have no pretensions. It paints survival in colors I can recognize. There are no fireworks, no epiphanies, no awards for making it through the grisliest years of your life. Delgado knows survival does not make you special. Her collection traces the horses of her youth, the stampedes that trampled many.

Play For Time / Paula Jane Mendoza / 2020

Play for Time / Paula Jane Mendoza / 2020

Paula Jane Mendoza puts the hip in hypnotic. Play for Time is a collection of poetry brimming with eros, longing, and fire. Think Natalie Diaz’s diction and rhythm tempered with Traci Brimhall’s slow soothing lyric. Typically, I am skeptical of literature with absurdly obscure or “long” words, but Mendoza finds a way to make words like “aphasic,” “maugre,” and “salamandrine” absolutely succulent . That said, you might need your dictionary handle.

The organization of PFT can feel a quizzical if you if you are used to poetry collections with a linear narrative. PFT consciously writes against the linear narrative, opting for a narrative that contorts itself, is more scrambled. The section headers for example are “First,” “So,” “Then,” “Beginning,” and “Middle” with a poem called “Alternate Ending 1” in section “So” and a poem called “The End” in section “Then”—both in the middle of the book. Some poems are glibly titled “Lyric,” “Narrative Poem,” and “Sentimental “Poem,” drawing attention to their genre. Rather than detracting, these titles get fun: 1) “Lyric” sketches seductive imagery, trying to capture the ineffable sensation of eros, both as in love and a lust for life: “I have been wanting to write outside / of thinking…” Mendoza croons, “I’m stupid with spring / and impatient with those / that refuse to burst, too stubborn / to purple such sudden luxury / out the ground.” 2) “Narrative Poem” Rather than a poem that scribes the A-B-C narrative of a heartbreak, this poem centers the poet’s resistance to narrative, the desire to be removed from it. It’s very Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and even alludes to it in the prose poem. 3) “Sentimental Poem”: God knows too many woman have been called sentimental, but how else do you write a love poem to your long distance partner? I chuckle when the speaker bashfully notes, “If I am being honest, romantic comedies are my jam.”

There is the heartbreak of a Yesika Salgado poem, where the reader throws on a novela, perrea sola, and downs some ice cream to cool the ache. Then, there is the heartbreak of a Paula Mendoza poem, where it feels more like crying in front of the bathroom sink as you try to love yourself enough to brush your teeth and fail. “I / can’t for the line of me extract any more / than I am / tired. I am tired / of myself when I think / of you and nowhere we are / headed towards, the last word / always / the first, again. Again.” If line breaks were wrist locks, readers will be wearing casts for weeks. Her poems pace and punch silence like clothesline to the neck. Take “Engineer,” for example.

Lastly, erotic poetry is notoriously difficult to write without feeling cheap. Mendoza’s erotic poems in this collection must be expensive because they stupefy. Here’s some videos if you don’t believe me. I recommend this book for anyone interested in Filipinx/Pinay literature, Asian literature, poetry, sequencing collections, erotica, feminism, and Utah.

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.