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.

Now in Color / Jacqueline Balderrama / 2020

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.