Unalloyed energy from a fresh voice.
El is a brash, kinetic prophet for a new age, and his poetry is his message.
“I never knew I was a poet,” writes El early on in his new collection. And that’s a good thing, because the fledgling author fills his verse with a raw power that one seldom finds in the works of tamer, more refined poets. His words fire up off the page, and if they sometimes feel ragged and uncut, we’ll happily take the raggedness along with all the heat and light he sends our way. Also unlike stuffier authors, El is unwilling to sit on the dusty shelves of high culture; he has a delightfully omnivorous poetic appetite, and he’ll as easily shoot off a verse about Art Basel—Miami’s ultrachic contemporary art showcase—as he will lines about cable queen Kourtney Kardashian—“Hair blowing / eyes glowing / long lashes / red lips / pale skin / black dress / nice aura / nice hips / I sleep with you ever night / Is that considered cheating?” It’s about time the oldest Kardashian got some love. But El spends less ink on pop-culture princesses than he does on more serious subjects, most notably the search for religious truth. Here, too, he is comprehensive in his exploration: “I studied Jesus, Allah, and Yah… / Maat and Ra…Yahweh and Jah / The sun, the moon, the ocean and star.” But if others decide they must pick one of these spiritual options, El instead selects all of the above; in a poem called “The Boddhisattva,” he writes, “I’m the alchemist, the seeker… / The prophet, / the Buddha, / the avatar, / the teacher.” As is perhaps obvious from his divinely inspired nom de plume, El will take religious answers where he can get them. Yet there is one truth that he lifts above all others—the notion that God isn’t above us but inside us. He crystallizes this insight in his poem “Thoughts …”: “If you think you are god?? / Then God you will be!” The idea that we are gods is powerful and provocative, and El’s only mistake is reminding us of it once too often. Yet he’ll have a chance to hone his language in future work: “This shit ain’t over … / Until they cover me with dirt.”
Unalloyed energy from a fresh voice.Pub Date: June 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496915788
Page Count: 138
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.
A collection speaks in part to the poet’s Mexican-American heritage.
In these multifaceted poems, Mexico-born, Houston-raised Salazar (Of Dreams and Thorns, 2017) explores general human themes like love and war in addition to specific experiences as a person of color. The book begins with a sensual meditation on desire, featuring luscious descriptions of a lover, from lips “moist like youth” to the body’s “softest velvet” slopes. The poems shift to odes to cultural icons like the Tejano star Selena and Mexican-German painter Frida Kahlo as well as occasion pieces honoring his brother’s 40th birthday and a friend’s mother’s memorial service. The author hits his stride when he delves into identity. In “I Am Not Brown,” he contemplates the societal implications of skin tone and his inability to fit into the rigid category of Caucasian or Latino. “For white and black and brown alike / Are slaves to history’s brush strokes,” he writes. “Grateful for the Work,” perhaps Salazar’s loveliest poem, catalogs the day of a laborer, starting with an early morning awakening and following him as he toils in 100-degree heat, enjoys tacos from his lunch pail, buys beverages from a child’s lemonade stand, and returns home to an equally hard-working wife. The author then makes an abrupt turn toward Syria in a series of poems that condemn that country’s president, Bashar Hafez al-Assad. They serve as a rallying cry for Syrians and grieve for the murdered masses. Salazar’s closing poem, “Sons of Bitches,” is a clunky rant about a 20-year-old immigrant shot in the head by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent. The gratuitous violence and political theologizing are ill at ease with the intimate, personal experiences that preceded them, such as the fablelike “A Mexican is Made of This,” in which Salazar beautifully describes the “rainbows, bronze, backbone, butterflies” that his people embody.
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991496-3-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Bronze Diamond Productions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.
Diehl’s debut poetry collection showcases the arduous search for human connection and self-understanding.
In free verse poems that combine strong metaphors with prosaic passages, the poet wanders along a lifelong path of self-knowledge. She first describes it as a “pilgrimage…to accept what’s been deemed unworthy inside us,” and the trail leads to important insights. In a plainly stated yet necessary reminder, the author asserts that being human, despite the loneliness one may encounter, “is not a solitary pursuit.” Above all else, the book voices a desire for transparency in the self and in others. In “Clear Stream,” moving water illuminates objects within it, even as mystery waits at the bottom, and the water’s clarity corresponds to the speaker’s offering of his- or herself to view: “Here I am. // Come see me if you want.” Sometimes the tumble of words in these short stanzas suggests a pouring forth of injury: “It’s the show-stopping blow of loss upending a heart pain over pain till capacity for love regulates its beating.” Readers will understand a back story involving love and loss, difficulty in communication, sadness, and acceptance of children growing up. The poems gain strength from well-chosen accompanying images, including sketches and paintings by Dimenichi and colorful works by Jamaican-born painter Powell that enrich the verbal landscape. Several full-page images by each artist appear, suggesting a thematic connection or amplifying an emotion in a given poem. A richly textured, grand illustration of a tree by Dimenichi, for example, appears alongside a poem that celebrates the inspiration of such towering entities. A poem concerned with self-reflection joins a Powell painting of floating, twinned female forms. The figures seem to both depict and satisfy the speaker’s need to be seen, with their emphasis on mirror images, body doubles, and echoes of shapes. Even the windshield of a car can be a “two way mirror” behind which the driver is “invisible to life outside.” An explicitly female body is glimpsed in the sketches, and the warm, dreamlike compositions give it substance.
Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-304-13091-4
Page Count: 58
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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