Book Review: Querida by Nathan Xavier Osorio

Photo courtesy of University of Pittsburgh Press

 

Nathan Xavier Osorio’s award-winning debut poetry collection, Querida, looks at the lives of a family of immigrant origin in the San Fernando area of Los Angeles. Chosen by Shara McCallum as the winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, this collection published in September by University of Pittsburgh Press as part of the Pitt Poetry Series explores the family’s place in the American landscape. Osorio shows how family, inheritance, memory, and transnational culture fill in spaces left by cracks in the terrain.

The forty-three poems of this rich, perceptive collection are divided into three sections and include a one-sentence first poem, “English as a Second Language,” poems that are sequences of sonnets titled “The Last Town Before the Mojave,” poems in the form of cantos, and persona poems. Except for its beginning poem, “Abandonarium,” the third section comprises poems with titles that start with the word “Ritual.”

Osorio examines themes of ancestry, the past, Americana, such as the game of baseball, and the American lives of immigrant parents and their children. “Querida” — the Spanish feminine word for “dear” and a term of endearment — not only serves as the title of the collection, but also appears in epigraphs of the book’s second section, and in “Querida América,” a poem in the second section made up of seven quatrains and one final stanza of five lines, which addresses America directly and delves into the speaker’s and speaker’s mother’s attitudes toward the United States. “Querida América, I remember your promise / and put my lips to the gas tank … Querida América, / the last train home has left” (61). The poem alludes to loneliness and unfulfilled dreams in a violent, capitalist, and an exploitative America.

A variety of divisions in America’s landscape can be found throughout the collection. For example, in the powerful opening poem, “English as a Second Language,” the speaker is separated linguistically from others in an educational institution: “in my collegiate days when I nodded submissively to a professor / who assured me my failure was because English was my second language” (5). Additionally, this poem and others feature the San Gabriel Mountains as a border and separation, while other poems refer to valleys, rivers, or earthquakes. More splits feature in the poem, “13 More American Landscapes, / a View-Master Reel,” which is made up of thirteen short-lined lyrical vignettes separated by one hyphen, including “The Liberty Bell’s fissure”; divorced, multicultural famous couple whose names are even separated in the poem’s lineation, “Lucille Ball and the Latin Lover, / Desi Arnaz”; and “The U.S.-Mexican border wall / puncturing the Pacific” (58). The breaks and barriers represent unrealized American ideals.

The collection’s final Section III, which consists of the “Abandonarium” and “Ritual” poems, plays with the multiple meanings of the word “extraction” — the extracting process, a thing extracted, and ancestry. Some “Ritual” poems seamlessly traverse languages from English to Spanish. The poem, “Ritual for Erasure,” repeats “This extraction site is an omission,” which calls attention to what is extracted, missing, and why; one response is: “This extraction site is an omission of that which could, yet still cannot: / the bruised phantom limbs and the prayer passed from mother to / son” (83). The extractions, such as the “phantom limbs” and mother’s prayer, suggest spirituals that have not yet manifested and absences stemming from lineage.

Querida’s American landscape is one of contrasts: “Hot Cheeto bags” juxtapose with “hand-stitched servilletas” (13), there are “pigeons / or palomas” (39), and “the barrio’s first and last organic grocery store” (87). Osorio mends gaps from disconnectedness with family relations, transnational markers, heritage, memories, and faith.

Osorio’s Querida is published by University of Pittsburgh Press.

 

Bios:

Nathan Xavier Osorio is the author of The Last Town Before the Mojave, selected by Oliver de la Paz for the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry, translations, and essays have been featured or are forthcoming in BOMB, the Offing, Boston Review, Public Books, Notre Dame Review, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and elsewhere. His writing and teaching have been supported by fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Kenyon Review, and the Poetry Foundation. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California.

LG Sebayan is a PhD English and Creative Writing student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where her work was selected by Nicky Beer for the Creative Writing Faculty Legacy Award for Poetry. Her poems are published or forthcoming in CALYX Journal, Midwest Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Editor at Cream City Review.

 

Book Review: The Girl Who Became a Rabbit by Emilie Menzel

By: Allie Farrell

(Note: lines are cited by section #, then page #. Example: [1.7] for section 1, page 7)

Photo credit: Sean T. Bailey

Emilie Menzel, a previous contributor to Cream City Review, debuted her first book of poetry through the Hub City Press in September. The Girl Who Became a Rabbit is a lyric told in 21 sections, weaving references to literature, film, and mythology, with thematic threads of “fable and trauma, femininity and creatureliness” to explore “how the body carries and shapes grief and what it means to tell a story.” Menzel is the winner of the 2023 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize, which comes as no surprise when reading. This haunting work is a fable, a metamorphosis, and a ghost story. It is full of ruminations and observations that build into tragic, tender, or even deliciously cathartic revelations about the body, spirit, and the written word.

The form of the first poem, the lyric’s “prologue,” foreshadows Menzel’s desire to have the reader picture the narrator in multiple bodies and forms. As a variation of the contrapuntal, the left-hand verse describes the narrator as a rabbit, while the right-hand is less clear and assumes a human form. Together, the narrator’s “creatureliness” becomes ambiguous while also establishing intelligence and introspection.

Transformations and transfigurations, for Menzel’s narrator, are a means of survival, as the “self” is often demonstrated as more incorporeal than its container. Many bodies are built and rebuilt over the course of the book. A few examples demonstrate the creation of a body as a means of protection, as early on the narrator says, “I built a body like I built a/ home—to keep the other out” [1.4], while an additional purpose is later stated: that they will “Build a body back to clarify: love is as much a choice/ as an impulse…” [2.10]. The act of creation, too, is protective, even if the body is not the narrator’s own: “Still wet in this turning, I built a body like a child who is/ folding…little body oh/ the body I formed” [10.27], but with its own limits, as the narrator is “…already skeptical…/ to care for anything built out of a jumbled skin/ skeleton.” [13.43]

The narrator picks up and puts down a variety of masks; the girl becomes a rabbit in the title, but she also becomes a swan, a seal, a ghost, all “[keep] a flickering in-between [their] bodies” [11.36] on black and white film or, rather, on black ink on a white page.

Menzel’s word choice and wordplay contribute beautifully to this visual carousel. Both readings of a verse often represent ambiguity in what form the narrator takes: for instance, a “season of trauma”[10.28] is a hunting season for a creature or a difficult period of a person’s life, or describing someone who “kept [the narrator] broken to keep [her] here” [5.17] possibly refers to emotional turmoil or physical abuse in a relationship, or even domesticating an animal to be “housebroken.” Menzel begs the reader to interpret and reinterpret her language, ask themselves whether it is better to be human, animal, both, or neither, in one stanza or another.

In all honesty, the nature (pun intended) of The Girl Who Became a Rabbit is difficult to express without going too far into summarization. Emilie Menzel’s voice is distinctly lush, confessional without creeping too far into autobiography, and both fluid and sharp in its delivery. The Girl Who Became a Rabbit is a lyric that hooks its readers, claws sinking in, and stays with them long after they’ve read the final lines.

The Girl Who Became a Rabbit is published by Hub City Press and distributed by Publishers Group West/Ingram. More information and purchasing options can be found here.

Bios:

Emilie Menzel is a poet and librarian whose hybridities have garnered such honors as the New Southern Voices Poetry Prize, the Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award in Poetry, and the Cara Parravani Memorial Award in Fiction. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and serves as an editor and librarian for The Seventh Wave community. Raised on barefoot Georgia summers, they now live in Durham, North Carolina and online at emiliemenzel.com.

Allie Farrell is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, studying English with an emphasis in Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies. She focuses on hauntings, history, and how the two intertwine. Allie is an Assistant Editor at The Cream City Review.

Book Review: Wager by Adele Elise Williams

By: Annaliese Kunst

Wager is former Cream City Review contributor Adele Elise Williams’ debut poetry book—as well as the finalist for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, in which the judge Patricia Smith described it as “crafted to upend the familiar.” This poetry collection explores how trauma fundamentally changes you and the harsh realities of an idealized Americana with meticulous wit and technique. 

As soon as you start reading Wager, Williams shocks and challenges the readers in a seemingly simple poem titled “Deconstructing Milk Baby” that grows more complex the deeper you look. The poem explores Williams’ life in a simplified, broken-down formula, using repetition of “and before that” to mimic the cyclical nature of life. The strongest part of this piece is when Williams showcases how everything that happens to us—from birth to death—changes who we are: 

“I was a floor baby / but not a bed baby / so my head / is round-round / like an acorn, / like a bumble / that bothered, left / and then returned. / Full circle. Full of resentment. / I am full of resentment / and fear. / I am a fearful woman.” 

Williams returns once more to playing with time and childhood anxieties in “Earliest-Memory Prompt.” The use of enjambment within this poem forces the reader to keep reading and reading at a quick pace, just how these images flash through the speaker’s mind when she recalls her childhood. Additionally, the speed and pace at which she guides you through the poem leads you to gut-wrenching, subtly confronting lines. Flashes of tense childhood memories scar and leave an imprint on you, yet as Williams showcases here, are just another snapshot within your mind. The poem ends on a shocking note that perfectly displays how traumatic memories as a young child shape you:  

“the heavy buckle snapping like cherry the dropping / like pop, no, it is like how at the deepest moment / of fucking i wanna die.”  

The poem, “God Bless Americana,” details how the very core of Americana is brutalized violence while also portraying the inequalities between social classes within this culture. Yet, there is a clash between the speaker and blue-collar culture when it comes to roadkill and violence. The word choice of this poem is terrific, consistently using words associated with death and gore to immerse us into the rural South setting, while also juxtaposing it alongside mentions of Santa and G.I. Jane to showcase the clash between the speaker and this culture of violence. The combination of violence and childlike imagery is what really sells the poem: 

“and after the neighbor shut her / door I ran to the beg, my hatchet at the ready, gripped cautiously / like a child’s hand while street crossing and when I opened / the trashed bag there was nothing inside but blood, blood.”  

In “Take the Bait” Williams explores how harsh realities of her childhood still persist within her. She details rescuing animals and trying to help them, but always ended up slowly watching them die. This cycle led to morbid curiosity and obsession, which later leaked into other aspects of her life, such as writing poetry. The violence of roadkill and animals being hunted and consumed is examined and paralleled alongside fruit imagery and innocence, perfectly showing Williams’ addictive nature. 

“I remember caring / for the strays under our house… I’d watch them die, always sick / and on the edge… Was my / interest in salvage or ritual?… I remember / the first poem I ever wrote — a clementine / full-faced and gasping as I consumed it / whole, even the juices hollered.” 

It is impossible to easily and quickly summarize Wager in a few words, just as it is impossible to write a review on it and capture all of its themes. Williams is a firecracker and has an expert understanding of pacing, switching from lingering on a graphic image or skipping right past it like it was an everyday image. She keeps readers on their toes and her collection begs you to keep reading until all the poems have been consumed whole. 

Wager is out now to read. Copies are available from University of Arkansas Press. You can order a copy here: https://www.uapress.com/product/wager/ 

Bios:

Annaliese Kunst is an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is majoring in English with a focus in Creative Writing. Previously, she was the Managing Editor of UWM’s undergraduate literary magazine Furrow.

Book Review: Softie by Megan Howell

By: Emily Barnard

Softie, written by Washington, D.C. author Megan Howell (pictured), is a thought-provoking book featuring a collection of short stories. These stories, while including contrasting characters, worlds, and genres, carry similar themes that ring true for many. Many of the protagonists in Howell’s stories are young women of color, who have experienced some form of prejudice either within their own experiences or their families’. 

Family is a prominent theme throughout Howell’s stories, both the challenging and priceless aspects of it. In particular, abuse within families is a subject touched on frequently, as is how Howell’s protagonists overcome it. Howell delivers on these themes in her stories in a powerful way, creating an air of sympathy and relatability for her various protagonists in their different, yet recognizable dynamics between parents and their children. 

One story in Softie that touches on the topic in an endearing and emotional way is the very namesake of the book, “Softie.” The story features a young Black girl named Clio who lives with her father, a famous Hollywood director. Clio’s father has treated her poorly her entire life, abusing her in ways a father never should. In this excerpt, Howell reveals Clio’s internal feelings toward her father: 

“I’d been infected by him for so long I could only feel sorry for him the same way he did for himself and maybe me to some extent. He looked like a little boy even though he towered above the squat businessmen sitting with him. His hands were folded politely in his lap. He nodded. His eyes look worried. His back was hunched. I felt so humiliated for him that I wanted to kill him just to stop feeling.”  

Clio resents her father for everything he has done to both her and the other girls in his industry. She is embarrassed that he is her father, but at the same time, knows no other alternative. Clio does not yet realize that there is a way out. Howell’s tragic and realistic tale of child abuse will make readers’ hearts ache for Clio. Throughout the story, Howell builds strong development for Clio as she realizes the extent of how troubling her situation is, and her desire to be free grows. 

Another story in Softie that explores such themes in both a harrowing and realistic way is called “Melissa, Melissa, Melissa.” The namesake of the title, Melissa, is a young girl who lives with her parents: a white father and a Black mother. While she has many fond memories of her father, a darker side to him is revealed throughout the story when Melissa recounts the moment leading up to him leaving. Howell successfully uses juxtaposition to compare the behaviors of Melissa’s parents, highlighting a healthy relationship between a parent and child with an unhealthy one. By telling the story in the eyes of a young girl, Howell captures just how damaging these situations are to children. Readers, through Melissa’s perspective, will feel just as powerless as she did when she reflects on her father’s behaviors toward his family: 

“I don’t think he ever apologized to Mom for anything. Not when he called her filthy names just to get a rise out of her; not when he went behind her back to make big, confusing purchases like the antique set of fishery books; not when he poked fun of her anger, dressed her down, or lied to her.” 

Though “Softie” and “Melissa, Melissa, Melissa” are written in a realistic nature, Howell has quite a few stories in Softie that, while drawing elements of the fantastical, still carry these recognizable themes of relationships and family. An example of such a story is “Kitty & Tabby.” The protagonist, Tabitha, is a high school girl who has remarkably familiar struggles. She does not have many friends, nor does she have a healthy relationship with her father. When Tabitha befriends Kitty, a girl who lives nearby, Tabitha’s perception of the world around her changes forever. Howell delivers these themes in a new, exciting way while digging deeper into the psychology of parents, exploring how many view their children as their own legacies. 

Abuse within families can take many forms and have various roots, which Howell portrays sensitively in Softie. By writing in the perspective of these young women, she demonstrates their inner thoughts superbly. Readers can feel how distraught and unsafe they feel in their situations and cannot help but root for them when their resolve to be free grows. Howell’s provocative stories, no matter the genre, will prove inspirational for anyone who can relate to and feel moved by the various strong and complex protagonists in Softie. 

Softie will be released in November 2024. Copies are available from West Virginia University Press.

Bios:

Megan Howell: Megan is a DC-based writer. She earned her MFA in Fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review and The Establishment among other publications. Her debut short story collection Softie is forthcoming with West Virginia University Press in November 2024.

Emily Barnard: Emily Barnard is an undergraduate student at UWM. She is majoring in English, currently on the Creative Writing track, and minoring in Film.

Book Review: Brazos by Justin Carter

By: Emily Barnard

Brazos is the first book written by former Cream City Review contributor Justin Carter. This poetry collection primarily focuses on Carter’s upbringing and childhood in a small Texas town. The poems within Brazos have themes within them that many, whether they’ve grown up in a small town or large city, can relate to. Themes of belonging, growing up, and desire for change are all found within Carter’s thought-provoking poems that ring true for many Americans’ lives. 

One poem in Brazos, “Self-Portrait Without Adornment,” details how Carter views his hometown after spending many years away. Like many, Carter left his hometown as an adult to discover what else was out there. In this poem, Carter reflects on the behaviors and mannerisms of the people he used to call neighbors. An excerpt from the poem that portrays this feeling of displacement reads: 

“I visit / for holidays & leave again, / a tourist in a world of familiarity. / Self-portrait as endless train. / Years ago, an electronic billboard / advertised the fireplace store / & the boat repair shop. But one morning, / I looked up and saw Barack Obama’s face / behind prison bars. I knew, then, / I needed to escape.” 

There were many factors that made Carter feel alienated from his community, and the imagery that he uses to display these complex feelings is phenomenal. These differing opinions and values in life were the deciding factor for him to leave his hometown behind and look to the future, to find a place where he can truly feel a sense of belonging. Without feeling connected to your community, it can be very hard to live a fulfilling life, which Carter portrays beautifully in this poem. 

Even though Carter emphasizes how important it was for him to leave his hometown behind, he does not gloss over the challenges and hardships that came with renouncing everything that he knew. Carter displays some of these melancholic feelings in this excerpt from “Self-Portrait Without Adornment”: 

“I’m 32 & know I’ve seen my parents / more in the past than I will / in the future.” 

Though Carter reflects on his hometown with a feeling of sorrow, there are some bittersweet aspects of his childhood that he looks upon with fondness, as seen in the poem “Some Things I Miss”: 

“Every bar called a beer joint & my uncle in a cowboy hat crooning George / Jones songs on Friday nights, the drift of cigarette smoke, the small / impact of pool cues. Straining my eyes in the midnight fog for a lone / doe beside the road, ready to swerve away.” 

The way Carter incorporates senses in this poem, such as hearing his uncle sing, and smelling cigarette smoke, helps readers imagine what life was like for him in this town. Though Carter knew that he had to leave his hometown to move forward with his life, he still holds fond memories of living there. Sometimes the smallest moments can be the most meaningful, and Carter illuminates this nostalgic feeling exquisitely.  

The poems in Justin Carter’s book Brazos display a sense of humanity that encourages reflection upon one’s own life. Growing up, moving away, and discovering who you are, are all aspects of life, even if hard, that everyone must go through. And even though it is important to move forward in this way, we should hold and treasure the memories that have shaped the people we have become. 

Brazos will be released on August 6, 2024. Copies are available from Belle Point Press.

Bios:

Justin Carter: Justin Carter’s poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, and other spaces. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor. Brazos is his debut collection.

Emily Barnard: Emily Barnard is an undergraduate student at UWM. She is majoring in English, currently on the Creative Writing track, and minoring in Film.