By Diego Báez
FROM: The Poetry Foundation

Central to Cenizas, the starkly beautiful debut by Salvadoran American poet Cynthia Guardado, are the destructive legacies of El Salvador’s long civil war, which raged from 1979–1992. Of particular interest to Guardado (who was born in Los Angeles), are the varied experiences of war across subsequent generations of Salvadoreños: the firsthand experiences of fighting by militants as opposed to the secondhand stories received by their expatriate children. But linguistic and geographic distances collapse under the weight of shared cultural trauma. In “What My Name Carries,” the speaker guards the true purpose of her visit from an immigration officer: “I don’t tell him // I’m here to write about the war.” Instead:

I tell him my tío is dying
& give him the address

of a priest—grief the only
language between us—
to explain why I’ve come here.

In other poems, the speaker draws on documentary art in an attempt to capture the experience of war, as in “Reflejo,” one of two ekphrastic poems that invoke photographs by Donna DeCesare. Read Rest of Review Here