Read: "The Chorus These Poets Create" in the December 2024 issue of Poetry Magazine
“The Chorus These Poets Create” celebrates the twentieth anniversary of Letras Latinas with a folio of breath-giving poems gathered from the astonishingly deep bench of writers who have helped to build this stalwart of Latinx letters into a national powerhouse. These twenty-six poems boldly chart two decades of triumph and tumult for U.S. Latinos, sometimes with defiantly queer “rocket shipped” intimacy (Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s “Transcendental Love Song”), sometimes in subversive thanksgiving (Jasminne Mendez’s “My First Thanksgiving on Hispaniola”). Here is U.S. Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco. Here is U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, who followed in the footsteps of the first Latino Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. What strikes me most is how deftly these poems measure the mental and physical health of Latinx individuals and communities during this turbulent period of U.S. Latino history. Rigoberto González meditates on living with Multiple Sclerosis with a gut-wrenching “gnawing.” Diannely Antigua riotously deromanticizes the moon by medicating it with Wellbutrin and other multisyllabic drugs. Emma Trelles, Carmen Giménez, and Michelle Otero dramatize the mornings and mournings of care work for aging and ill parents. In heidi andrea restrepo rhodes’s “Transgender opera for perpetual metamorphosis,” her “beloved wields the syringe” in “chemical & intramuscular intimacy” as she “kiss[es] his pectoral scars,” while in Carmen Calatayud’s hip replacement lyric, “metal” becomes a “medicine.” Through these struggles and victories their songs rise to a chorus of celestial yawps from these the “earthly ensigns” (Edgar Garcia, “Cantares”) of Latinx world-making. When the folio concludes with Blanco’s incantatory, raucous curses, I am transported back to Gina Franco’s ghosts, who “expect to be // returned to time / this time.” These poets are the custodians of their ancestors’ timely passage from embodied lives to dignified afterlives. Thanks to Letras Latinas, their words and stories have a home where past, present, and future poets and readers can commune.
-Michael Dowdy, Villanova University
Michael Dowdy is the author of Tell Me about Your Bad Guys, which will be published in the University of Nebraska Press's American Lives series (spring 2025). His other books include the critical anthology Poetics of Social Engagement (Wesleyan University Press, 2018, coedited with Claudia Rankine); the collection of poems Urbilly (Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, 2017); and the study of Latinx poetry Broken Souths (University of Arizona Press, 2013). His articles and essays on Latinx literature have appeared in American Poetry Review, Aztlán, Chicago Review, Contemporary Literature, The Georgia Review, Poetry, and The Writer's Chronicle, among other venues. He teaches at Villanova University.