University of Wisconsin Press
March 19, 2024
ISBN : 9780299347840
With my writer hat on, certain terms come to mind when reading Saúl Hernández’s debut collection: surrealism, formal variation, subtle and graceful musicality. But this collection pulls me in by the heart, not the brain. I remove my writer hat and new words come out: tender, vulnerable, brave. I read on and even these words are dislodged from my throat. Each poem bounces around my ribcage, down into my gut. These are poems written from the body, for the body.
4. Half of her children wanted to burn her: Esa no es mamá, es nada más que un cuerpo. The other half wanted to bury her because a body needs rest. In “How to Outline a Body: Fragments after Tatarabuela Ignacia’s Passing,” Hernández catalogs moments with the speaker’s abuela, moving through time and space, through life and death. The way each numbered fragment shifts through rituals and memories creates a feeling that reflects the chaotic experience of grief. The speaker watches as tías wash Abuela’s body and brush her hair, images that create a contemplation on the relationship between soul and body. Hernández doesn’t say “soul” or “ghost,” and that absence of language builds the feeling of something other than the body present in the poem. What’s in the poem is the physical, the observable, the tactile. The body is present throughout the collection in different ways. In the poem “Breath Is a Body at War,” the body is a vessel to carry the reader through juxtaposing stories in each stanza. In the opening stanza, the reader is introduced to the body of the speaker’s abuelo: Before the body knows breath, it knows war. The way there was a war inside the hands of Abeulo,
who plucked tomatoes off vines until his hands were
left purple & red. Who passed down his hands to Apá & how his hands smelled of gasoline & oil, no matter how many times he washed. Who passed down his hands to me.
The images of hands–of a grandfather and father–how they are tattered from work and smell of stereotypical masculine things like “gasoline & oil,” sets the reader up for the jarring shift in the following stanza. The speaker appears outside of a bar, reliving a violent encounter with a man who is struggling to accept his own sexuality: “Outside a bar, a drunk man gives me a fireball kiss, heat goes / inside of me. Afterward, he shoves his fist / into my face.” The poem continues with this pendulum swing method between stanzas, jumping to a touching story about the speaker’s abuela, then back to a sexual encounter, and so on. Moving between family and sexuality is a way for the poem to tell a story about imposed guilt, how the speaker has to fight the oppression of both lovers and family to live in a way that is true to who they are. It also tells a story about inheritance. To me, it seems to suggest that the speaker is trying to say that they didn’t choose their sexuality, that like the hands Abuelo passed down to Apá, the speaker’s heart was passed down to him, too.
Contrasting images of violence and sexuality appear throughout the collection. In the book’s title poem, “How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters,” the speaker again jumps between different stories, using a collage effect to build a feeling in the space between what’s there and what’s not there.
Before the goat finished bleeding out Abuelo closed its eyes, told it, Yo no soy un
monstruo.
My ex-boyfriend says, Don’t be afraid of me. I love you.
What’s found in this poem is representative of what can be found in the collection as a whole: tenderness pressed up against terror. The speaker’s abuelo takes him out hunting in one stanza, and then the next stanza features a memory from childhood when the speaker was bullied for their sexuality. It goes on like this–toggling between love and war making them almost indistinguishable from one another–until the final line when the speaker makes the conscious decision to focus on love: “Because to kill would mean I’m a monster too / & I want to end with beauty.”
Brent Ameneyro is the author of the collection A Face Out of Clay (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2024) and the chapbook Puebla (Ghost City Press, 2023) . He was the 2022–2023 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. He currently serves as the Poetry Editor for The Los Angeles Review.