THE FUTURE OF POETRY IS BROWN & QUEER

by Soraya Membreno

From: bitch media

Despite what National Hispanic Heritage Month would have you think, Latinx writers exist year-round! And despite what headlines like “Poetry is going extinct, government data show,” predict, this is a moment of poetic renaissance and poets of color are paving the way.

Vickie Vértiz’s Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut, which came out this September from the University of Arizona Press, sidesteps the glare of Hollywood to center the lives of the Brown working class in southeast Los Angeles. Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut is an offering; to a people, to a city—but it is also an irreverent reclaiming of land and home for those who have always been here.

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s Beast Meridian, also out this September from Noemi Press, is a haunting, a heartbreak. Beast Meridian turns trauma into astounding mythology, pushing through loss and erasure to find what it means to be a woman, to be lost, to find yourself anyway.

These collections wrecked me, leaving me weeping in public while I thumb through them at the laundromat or while waiting in line at the grocery store. But they have also made me feel fiercely proud of our stories, our histories. These are the books that have reflected and articulated a vision of Latinx identity I had never seen in literature, and that frankly, I never thought I would see. Their impact cannot be overstated.

I meet Vickie Vértiz and Vanessa Angélica Villarreal at a bar in Highland Park, a historic neighborhood in Los Angeles which, in the span of too-few years, has gone from a majority Mexican-American community to a lifestyle feature in Vogue. As we sit around a table in the bar’s back patio, the remnants of a Girls Scout troop meeting disperse, with the remaining parents discussing, I shit you not, the pros and cons of buying a horse for self-care.

A perfect backdrop for discussing the resistance inherent in telling the stories of queer, Brown, working class women of color, right?

Both of your books are rooted in place. Talk to me about home as a physical space, about leaving and returning.

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal: Beast Meridian started as a project of trying to write myself into existence. I remember reading a lot of Chicanx work and feeling like it was so varied, what every poet and every writer was trying to do with their books, yet it all gets lumped together as this documentarian project of “this is how my abuela was” and “this is how it felt like to be poor” and “this is what it felt like to do this.” Especially when it comes to writing about identity and history and family, Chicanx and Latinx work across the board gets unfairly overlooked because people have certain expectations about that. I wanted to create a project that was rooted in place, was rooted in the act of remember and misremembering, in the act of creating your own narrative from the ruins of erasure. And of mapping the emotional textures of that, instead of trying to access real memories. Because those memories are eroding quickly and what the missing feels like, what the longing and the memory feels like, that is what I wanted to capture formally and through the strangeness of language.

Vickie Vértiz: My geography of home was very small; the circumference of home was very small. And my relationship to home is connected really closely to the way my father related to the family he made with my mom. Which is that he was gone a lot. And because he was a man he could be gone a lot. He could be at the yonque (at the junkyard), he could be at work, he could be anywhere he wanted. And it extended to the point of him creating a whole other family in Tecate, in Baja California. Because there’s the immigrant idea that you’re coming here for something better, but then there’s the male idea that there’s always someone better. And not just male, but maybe capitalist in some way. My model of home was that I could leave, and I should leave, and I could always come back. Read Rest of Interview Here