Book Review: Mouth Filled with Night by Rodney Gomez
Mouth Filled with Night
Poems by Rodney Gomez
Northwestern University Press, February 2014
ISBN-13: 978-0810129771
$9.95; 46pp.
Reviewed by Alix Anne Shaw
“Everything I see is drowning,” writes Rodney Gomez in Mouth Filled with Night (“Head of a Jewel Scarab”). “Hold your mouth shut / and you bring the river / into you” (“Speaking River”). In this slim but stunning chapbook, Gomez conveys both the agony of silence and the pain of articulation, asking what it means to speak when one’s language and identity are born of cultural displacement.
Throughout the volume, Gomez examines a wide range of Mexican-American voices and identities. Night becomes an overarching metaphor for forces that silence and oppress. Among the finest poems is “Drag Racer,” which channels the voice of a Mexican father who is openly baffled at discovering his son’s queer identity. “So that was the white he had wanted to wear,” the father muses, “a mouth open with light. What every boy needs to become a man is night. Or so I thought, taking the black scroll from my mouth. Watching him weave it into a corsage.”
Gomez not only inhabits an array of voices; his language too is a mescla, a mix of deeply resonant vocabularies and modes. The poems are filled with dense aural textures made all the more powerful by their wide-ranging diction and syntax. For instance, in “Escutcheon for Pochos,” he writes,
We rode slingshot with Tezcatlipoca. Devouring the sky’s deterministic bosom. Rain scherzos trailing us. Spitting chapapote from our blackened mouths. Then the year we learned to scrape the talk box from our lips.
Gomez’s poems not only move between vocabularies but between formal and conceptual registers, as in “Farmworker as Existential Quantifier,” where water becomes a metaphor for individual and collective survival. At home everywhere and nowhere, Gomez seems as comfortable in the ghazal as in the prose poem, in Spanish as in English. Throughout the work, he invokes Mesoamerican mythology, magical realism, and gritty realism in equal measure, as if insisting that each has its own valid claim to reality.
Birthed from split identity and muffled by a range of external forces, Rodney Gomez’s Mouth Filled with Night gives voice to a range of experiences that have no solid ground to occupy. Going beyond the simple autobiography and plain-spoken lyric narrative of so many first collections, these poems resonate with lyric innovation and emotional complexity. One only hopes for a full-length work from this compelling new voice.
Alix Anne Shaw is the author of Undertow, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize, and Dido in Winter (Persea Books, December 2013). Her poems have appeared in journals including Harvard Review, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, and New American Writing. Also a visual artist, she is currently a graduate student of writing and sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work can be found online at www.anneshaw.org.
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