Santa Tarantula by Jordan Pérez | Published: February 2024 | University of Notre Dame Press |
ISBN 9780268207526 | $18
“What a creature, who can be fully sucked away and still
leave behind her little life-
like shell.”
–Jordan Pérez, Santa Tarantula
In Santa Tarantula, Jordan Pérez employs biblical narratives to explore childhood abuse and, more broadly, gender violence. In controlled, unambiguous lines, Pérez conjures an image of feminine brokenness, ruthlessness, and perseverance.
“This is how you kill a tarantula. / Cover her, and hope to God she suffocates.” So read the final lines of the title poem of this collection, a warning to men foolish enough to harm a woman, a mother, without finishing the job. “Men Everywhere Are Setting Traps” describes one such pattern of gender violence: “The men’s amusing experiment: to see if the right- / hand claw, removed, might grow back.” Violence, including sexual violence, is not limited to adults; in “Deadgirl,” the speaker describes how a deep-seated fear of “the man who touches little girls” results in her inability to “stop thinking of [her] own ladyness,” equating femininity with vulnerability to men. Poems like “Jael” and “Lot’s Daughter” highlight the vengeance of biblical women as it becomes physically and emotionally violent: “I never knew I could touch evil, / play with its edges like some wild thing.” Santa Tarantula justifies women’s violence as a response to repeated abuses, although the violence is not always directed toward the abusers. This complicates the idea that violence begets more violence, arguing that such cycles perpetuate gendered power dynamics, making women both victim and self-oppressor.
The gendered violence in Santa Tarantula is often associated with hunger. In “The Dream,” for instance, the narrator recounts: “The boys I have loved…eat and eat and each time I bring out a new dish it is devoured before I can sit with them.” This dichotomy–a woman who prepares the meal for a man to consume–is a well-established feature of patriarchal cultures. Santa Tarantula proposes that hunger is also a stand-in for violence, and, thus, that women’s starvation is another iteration of the aforementioned violent response to trauma, except self-imposed rather than externalized: “Your favorite part / of me, my cupped hipbone, empty / as a half mango scooped clean of its flesh…I think of the woman in the Bible / who asks for John’s head on a platter. / Maybe she was only hungry.”
In this collection, the narrator observes and internalizes self-effacing, self-sacrificing behavior from another victim of her father: her mother.
I almost forgot to keep on living
one winter so thin it grabbed its own shoulder blades
[…]
[my mother] and I
we sing the alto parts nice girls don’t ask for solos
Fill our pockets with hydrangeas tell a man to touch us
The mother’s response to her trauma inadvertently models self-sacrifice to her daughter, who subsequently relates violence to strength. In “Upended,” for example, the speaker believes the blood on her mother’s cheek “makes her look strong…in the way that might confuse birth and death.” The mother’s withstanding of her husband’s abuses models behaviors that the speaker struggles to parse in childhood: “I wonder what it’s like to dance / with someone who cannot hold you,” she laments. Ultimately, she must unlearn what she has observed, reckoning with the complicity of her mother in perpetuating gender violence through generations. This pithy, poignant sentiment is captured in a line from the final poem: “How do you teach a girl to cling to everything good / of her mother and none of the rest?”
Brittany Torres Rivera is a bilingual, Puerto Rican writer. She graduated from Florida International University with a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Brittany is an alumna of the Fulbright Program and currently works as an Editorial and Administrative Assistant at Graywolf Press.
Comments