sad girl poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016) by Christopher Soto
I’ve read a ton of gorgeous poems I have quickly forgotten.[wp1] Christopher “Loma” Soto’s poems can at times be rough, blunt, and formally chaotic, but it’s near impossible to forget a poem by Loma. Take “Home,” for example, the first poem off Loma’s chapbook, Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry, 2016). “Home” staggers under the formal restraints of the villanelle, barely following the rules of repetition and abandoning the rhymes. It breaks lines on words like “the” and “my,” which are often considered weaker, and repeats the phrase “I’m crying,” which puts the poem at risk of being read as sentimental. In short, many readers could consider this poem a bad villanelle. [wp2] But it’s a much more urgent and touching poem than almost all the villanelles I have read. Sad Girl Poems makes me never want to write a “good” poem again. Better write poems with sloppy and quivering bravery, then poems that would shrink into the dust without their overwritten imagery and formal pyrotechnics. In “Home,” the difficulty of the language to conform to formal expectations of the villanelle mirrors the way the queer homeless speaker staggers under the weight of the police state. “I’m broken like a wishbone,” the speaker tells us, and the same can be said of the form: it’s “broken like a wishbone,” which is to say violently.[1] By whom? Perhaps by the speaker themself, whose struggle to survive leaves them with broken dreams. More likely by the police, the reader, and anyone who reads the speaker as “criminal” and as something (definitely not as someone) that needs correcting. This first poem serves as a warning to all narrow-minded readers: Loma is a radical poet who will not conform the queer homeless experience to fit your limited formal and political expectations.
And thank god Loma does not conform. In the thirty-nine short pages of Sad Girl Poems, Loma narrates the story of a queer speaker who experiences homelessness and domestic violence all while struggling to come to terms with the suicide of their first lover, Rory. Rory haunts this chapbook, interrupting the speaker and forcing them to wrestle with their memory. The poet faces these challenges while swimming against the current of mainstream poetics, formally and politically. As a writer of color, I am fascinated by the way other writers of color maneuver themselves around their white audiences.[2] Loma confronts similar challenges in Sad Girl Poems head-on by tackling the white audience problem in the preface. “I won’t write narrative poems for white people,” Loma tells us. “I WON’T ALLOW MY NARRATIVE, MY HURT, MY SADNESS, & MY LIFE TO BE BOUGHT, SOLD, CONSUMED, & SHAT OUT (& never actually addressed).” As many writers of color know, that’s a hard standard to meet, maybe even impossible, but Loma does an amazing job counterattacking these problematic readers by challenging them before they even read the first poem and by asking all readers to donate to Ali Forney Center[3] and Black & Pink[4]. Please don’t bother reading the rest of this book review unless you’ve followed those links and given a piece of your extra cash to these very necessary organizations.
Understanding Loma’s insistence on an active—even an activist—reading of their work is essential for understanding the poetics and the narrative arc of Sad Girl Poems. “I always wanted to be a sad white girl,” Loma laments in the opening sentence. They explain, they have always wanted a sadness people would mobilize for. A sadness worth an Amber alert. A sadness worth “a 1000 ships launched because we are missed”.[5] The sadness of “the sad girl”, a trope of resistance that usually only cis-white woman have access to. In Sad Girl Poems, Loma expands that trope to include people like them: Latinx (by way of El Salvador and Puerto Rico), gender non-conforming, queer, and much more. Loma does not write a sentimental sadness, but a sadness that becomes an unshakeable part of you and leaves you with no other choice but to fight for your life. Loma invites the activist reader to transform and embody this sadness, much the same way Rory comes to embody it. Loma tells us,
That night, after my father smashed / the television glass with his baseball / bat, I met Rory at the park…he felt my bruises as they became / a part of him.
Only in this way—by taking in the bruises of queer and homeless communities—can the reader stand in true solidarity with Loma.
This centering of sadness, however, does not mean Loma provides an emotional landscape of queer and homeless life without any complexity. Throughout Sad Girl Poems, there are choking moments of happiness and gratitude, tenderness and tenacity. These moments are shattered and bruised, taken and incomplete, but they keep resurrecting, if briefly. Even in the bleakest moments, there is a memory, the ghost of a lover, a small joy haunting these poems. In “Those Sundays,” Loma tells us how Rory
watched me / undress & run through the ticking / sprinklers]. I fell beside him then. / beneath the maple tree. / & he saw my goosebumps from the cold.
What is this passage if not a moment of unabashed liberty and intimacy, a shard of joy? In “Crush a Pearl [Its Powder],” They continue,
We were so alive. My heart // a red cardinal // resting between two / Rib cages. Its wings expanding. Rory—
Here is a remix of a familiar trope, the caged bird that sings. There is a happiness, a liveliness here, imprisoned but still regaining its strength, resting, still eager to fly. Even in the last poem, “The Hatred of Happiness,” Loma tells us,
broken-boys can’t / make a proper home. Just listen to my chest. / One-thousand lovers are stuck inside me / Beating—thud, thud, thud, thud, thud.
Here, the speaker embodies the sadness of the broken-boys; they are his heart, beating. Loma imagines the speaker’s heart as the gay ghetto of heaven, a final home and resting place. There is more than just sadness in these lines: there is love, tenderness, and a small piece of salvation for all broken-boys—whose voices were silenced in life, in the trope of “the sad girl,” but given life here, in Loma’s chest, and maybe, in the reader’s as well. This decentering of happiness does not abandon happiness and gratitude altogether, but instead refocuses on sadness and empathy as a way of driving readers to awaken themselves to the pain of others and act.
Loma asks their readers to act because they know poetry can only do so much to heal us, can only do so much to liberate us. In “Ars Poetica,” Loma mourns their dead lover Rory while confessing “this is such a useless fucking poem.” They write these heart-wrenching, beautiful lines about Rory and about ultimately poetry—“I want everything to have a purpose— / the beak, the bones, the baby blue / vodka veins”—only to admit that “they mean nothing to me.” They spend a whole chapbook struggling through the death of Rory only to realize all the poems “are about me.” Here, like everywhere,[6] Loma gets especially vulnerable, acknowledging the limitations of art, an honest and suffocating move. Loma confesses poetry will not make Rory come back; hell, it might not even heal us. But poetry still enables us to awaken to the struggle of others, and in that way, it pushes the poet and reader forward to fight and heal in other ways—politically and personally. This move is one that aligns Loma’s work with poets from the Black Arts Movement and La Generación Comprometida, who understand a true political poetics must come with social justice activism in order to maintain its integrity.
For those who don’t know the game, La Generación Comprometida was a political arts movement in El Salvador during the 1950s. The movement’s most iconic figure is Roque Dalton, a poet and guerrillero who died in a military conflict.[7] The only other thing I’ll say about him here is that he once was in jail, scheduled for execution because of his revolutionary work, and after praying to God in a moment of desperation, an earthquake freed him from the prison[8]—which is important because it shows Salvi poets are straight-up prophetic. I mention all of this because one of the most impressive things about Sad Girl Poems is how it interacts with Dalton’s work and what it means for Salvadoran poetics in the diaspora.[9] Of all the Salvi poets writing in English right now, Loma’s work feels most charged with the spirit of Roque Dalton, both in style and in activism: their writing shares a declarative style, a political surrealism, and an insistence on centering politics. Loma has carried on Dalton’s revolutionary ethic in literary communities by leading the UndocuPoets campaign, starting a literary journal for queer poets of color called Nepantla, and touring to end queer youth homelessness. Loma’s work is fighting to shake awake the literary world right now and foretells what powerful transformations can take place in our communities if only more Salvis are passed the mic. [wp3]
On the page, Loma engages these Salvadoran poetics explicitly by riffing off of Dalton’s lines in a minor key. In “Myself When I’m Real,” the most playful and emotionally complex poem in the chapbook, Loma writes,
How dumb // we must have been—
To hold each other so frailly.
To hold anything at all—
The blue landscape of January days.
The taste of pan dulce—
“The blue landscape of January days” is a line Loma lifts and translates from Roque Dalton’s most iconic poem “Como tú” (in English, “Like You”).[10] “Como tú” can be read as the ars poetica not only of Dalton but La Generación Comprometida and many other circles of political poetry.[11] In “Como tú,” Dalton democratizes poetry by declaring poetry, like bread, is for everyone; “the blue landscape of January days” serves to connect the reader and poet through something they share in common: their enjoyment of love, life, and nature. In “Myself When I’m Real,” Loma revises this line by declaring the happiness derived from these January days “dumb.” This isn’t a dismissal of Dalton’s poetics though. In the same poem, Loma still tells us, “You’re the reason I live…/ You stumbled into me / [Again & again]”. Here, the “you” is either the lover or the reader, who Loma continues to hold on to, through thick and thin, no matter how dumb it is. This poem is tragic for the way it grapples with loss yet remains triumphant for the way the “you” and the speaker continually stumble into one another, refusing to let go. In Sad Girl Poems, the speaker may be heartbroken, homeless, battered, and bruised but they remain undefeated, possessing a chilling amount of grit and tenacity.
Which brings me to the last poem, a poem that brutally ties together many of the themes we’ve been wrestling with so far. I have yet to read a collection whose last poem sucker-punched me as hard as Loma’s “The Hatred of Happiness”. After page after page of breathtaking vulnerability, after showing us their bruises and allowing us to take them on as our own, after we have fallen in love with Loma and all their tragicomedic wit and beauty, Loma tells us,
…I’m drawing the curtains
& asking you to leave. [I don’t want any visitors].
I don’t want you to love me. My porch
lights are turned off. My doorbell won’t be
answered. Do you understand?!
If I had an ounce of happiness, or
A bag of sugar, to give you—I would.
But all I own are these little lips.
They kiss, then close [like the lid on
A casket]. Please, let me die alone.
After seeing the speaker struggle and fight so much, I wanted so badly for them to find redemption, a fulfillment that spits in the face of the world that has constantly tried to annihilate them. But Loma doesn’t let the reader go there with them. This is the most important move Sad Girl Poems makes. It doesn’t give the reader the satisfaction of having completed a masterful chapbook by a brilliant poet and finding in it hope and redemption. Instead, it pushes the reader away from the speaker and outside of the text to renegotiate their relationships to queer and homeless communities. It leaves us aching with this newfound pain and understanding. It leaves us ready to act.
This ending can be read as a suicide, where the speaker abandons the world that failed to love them and chooses to die. In this naturalistic ending, where the speaker is at the mercy of oppressive forces, the speaker closes their lips like a casket, silencing their voice, and kills themself, a fate far too many queer folk are forced to choose.
There are other readings of this ending, however; for those familiar with Dalton’s poetry, “Hatred of Happiness” reads like a riff of “Alta Hora De La Noche”, where Dalton asks his admirers to please not repeat his name after his death.[12] I have no doubt Dalton knew he was most likely going to die in the struggle for revolution. In this poem, he resists the urges of his readers to mythologize his life. “Don’t let your lips discover / my eleven letters,” Dalton asks us. “I’m sleepy, I loved, I have earned the silence.” Dalton like Loma asks the reader not to love him, to let him die alone. This move is important because it motivates the reader to act, rather than mourn or idolize the dead. How many people do you know that idolize MLK or Malcolm X but haven’t organized anything in their communities themselves? How many academics and writers do you know that spend their lives studying revolutionaries without bringing their work into their communities? Dalton and Loma don’t need your love, they need you to do the work. They need you to donate your money to important causes. They need you to fight homophobia and white supremacy in your communities. They need you to call out and transform institutions that oppress us. Without this pushing away, the poet risks having their readers finding themselves content with just reading something political and radical, rather than doing the work.
Lastly, a careful reader will observe that Loma’s words in this last poem echo the words of the “homeless” woman in the penultimate poem “Home [Chaos Theory]” almost verbatim. “Home” is such a fraught concept in Sad Girl Poems: it is the site of domestic abuse, homophobia, and transphobia; it is the intimacy and warmth of Rory’s car; it is a gay ghetto; it is in Loma’s heart. In “Home [Chaos Theory]”, Loma deconstructs the meaning of home. One of its most powerful moments is when a police officer tells a “homeless” woman to move from her neighborhood and she tells him:
THIS IS MY HOME!
I HAVE LIVED HERE FOR OVER TWENTY YEARS.
I WILL NOT MOVE!!!
I’M GOING TO DIE HERE. JUST LEAVE ME ALONE AND LET ME DIE!!!![13]
Rather than being a suicide, Loma’s last poem can be read as an echo of this woman’s incredible resistance. Sad Girl Poems ends on Loma’s last stand, holding down the home they’ve created for themself, refusing to submit to the violence of the police officer or the reader, withholding from the reader the heart of a soul too sacred, too powerful for the rest of the world see.
[1] Interestingly, the whole snapping a wishbone tradition is a rather violent one with a history of colonialism. Etruscans used to pet wishbones while making wishes. After they were colonized by the Romans, the Romans stole the tradition and started fighting over the wishbones and snapping them, because that’s just what warmongers naturally tend to do apparently. For more, click here: http://www.republicofyoublog.com/fashion/origin-of-the-wishbone-tradition/
[2] Click here to read about review about how Natalie Scenters-Zapico deals with the white audience problem here: https://indianareview.org/2015/12/micro-review-natalie-scenters-zapicos-the-verging-cities/
[3] Donate here: https://aliforneycenter.donordrive.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=donate.general
[4] Donate here: https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/blackandpink
[5] This line is taken from “not an elegy for mike brown” by Danez Smith, a fellow queer POC poet. In this poem, Smith also draws attention to the way people react to POC pain versus white girl pain in the lines: “think: once, a white girl / was kidnapped & that’s the Trojan war. / later, up the block, Troy got shot / & that was Tuesday.” Click here for the complete poem: http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/not-an-elegy-for-mike-brown
[6] Except the last poem. We’ll talk more on that later.
[7] For more on Roque Dalton, click here: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/roque-dalton
[8] Read Ernesto Cardenal’s description of the events here: http://www.uhmc.sunysb.edu/surgery/car-dalt.html
[9] This acknowledgement of Loma’s work isn’t intended to dismiss or minimize the work of other Salvi poets. Javier Zamora was a co-founder of the UndocuPoets campaign and Yesika Salgado is a huge voice in the body positivity and feminist scenes. Leticia Liñares-Hernandez’s entire professional and artistic repertoire is based on serving POC communities. Jose B. Gonzalez is well-known for his work building bridges to higher education for Latinos. Each of these poets write amazing poems and do amazing work. My point here is more of a question of style.
[10] For the complete poem in English and Spanish, click here: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/Roque-Dalton---a-Great-of-Latin-American-Poetry-20150511-0031.html
[11] In fact, Martín Espada lifts another line from the poem for the title of an anthology of mostly Latin American and Latinx political poetry, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press.
[12] I have no idea whether Loma is aware of “Alta Hora De La Noche”, but that’s irrelevant. Dalton and Loma’s politics coincide enough that this parallel could have happened naturally. Reader, do yourself a favor and check out this kick-ass poem: http://bombmagazine.org/article/1121/three-poems
[13] I omitted parts of this quotation for concision in my argument. Please buy Sad Girl Poems and read the poem without my adulterations.
[wp1]The intro makes less sense to me without this line.
[wp2]I think this clarifies what I am trying to say, but I’m worried about it being read as harsh or insensitive. In the poem, the first lines of the poem the speaker is sucking dick for rent. What I am trying to do is set up a defense for this poem against readers who would critique its bluntness. Is that working? Or am I merely replicating the problematic reading?
[wp3]I’m invested in keeping this for contextual reasons and visibility reasons. The history of Latinx/Latin American poetry, especially Central American, gets short-changed a lot. We gotta take advantage of spaces we are given to tell our stories. Plus, there’s only so much of it I can summarize before the context loses its meaning.