Review: Wild Invocations by Ysabel Y. González

by Joshua Escobar

Wild Invocations
Ysabel Y. González
Get Fresh Books, March 2019.
$20.00; 70 pp.
ISBN:0998935859

Recollections, resolutions, and rifts make up this collection, which focuses on a young Puerto Rican born in the Bronx and raised in Newark, New Jersey, who makes her way through a cityscape of love, gentrification, and music. Her poetry is soulful, such that it feels like she’s walking with you along the Hudson River–on the Jersey side. She is wearing spaghetti straps “slapped up against a dissected tattoo.” As in “Summer Skin,” she writes,

“… I’d cut at night, in the snow,
the way a laborer unsheathes a hooked sickle to prune
away the rot in a thick thuja…….I prowled
under the numb, for just one raw slice
that was not savage, and in the sheared
hedge of flesh, an emerald nerve revealed itself
In spring, I’d found a new shape in the bloom
and by June, my skin, a deep rose red”

Her poems often begin with a lingering feeling, a lingering moment. Her rhythms sync with the hushed and echoing frequencies in which we talk to ourselves. Her lines draw on the political vocabulary of self love, with which we contend with others and the world. Shifting between somber reflection and spirited conversation, her lyricism dares us to look beyond her voice to the burdens, problems, and aches of others. Open to insight and impulse, she navigates the give-and-take nature of relationships, community, and working life. In one of the opening poems, “Weight of Extinction,” she is sharing a bed with a best friend, their phones going off at 2 a.m. She wonders,

“how much fat was in the vanilla milkshake I had earlier today, and as I count
sheep, I think about all the ways my best friend and I fold–gorgeousness in our thigh’s,
dimples, backside curves, our chunky midsections crisply curling into other fleshy parts”

Her poems come from a youthful place. Inexhaustible, or made to bloom, all of them operate like they are 21. Or whatever the age is when our work and gifts take shape, and we all play a part, some minor yet definite part, in shaping the future; the age when we don’t know much about the world. And, that is a good thing since the world doesn’t seem to know much about us. Put another way, these poems come straight from the heart–a heart “brave” and “mangled,” a heart bathed in “rage & mania,” a heart “unshackled” and “passed down,” a heart that “takes up too much space,” a heart “tethered to a bedroom,” a heart “not painted over white,” a heart “that wants to fight.”

Wild Invocations addresses that sacred, inexhaustible, universal obsession: love. As a poet, González understands the way we long for “blissful, engorged quiet” or how we yearn for a “peeled blessing.” Alternating between distance and sensitivity, her suite of love poems ponder the fountain of feelings that makes passion vital. She says, toward the end of “Abecedarian Invoked for Ache”

“Tonight, I take back my flesh
until I am still
very still… My giant
yoke is his body, and after I chew my craving will be reset to
zero”

The resolutions she arrives at are hard-won. Poem after poem she undertakes the painstaking work of thinking through failed relationships that shape who we are from who we were. Broken relationships, she realizes, can lend themselves to unsustainable pleasure and pain. In her opening poem, “Fruit,” which stems from a bit of advice from her therapist (stop reaching for low-hanging fruit), she writes:

“When were you last gifted
gentleness of an open hand?
I bet it felt cool, rain on a sun-sparked forehead.”

Those of us who are caught in desire’s web can place some trust in her even-handedness. Her lines are usually direct, and her use of metaphor disciplined. Ultimately, these contrasts of waking and want compose the love poems in Wild Invocations.

Part of the beauty of this poetry collection is the way González imagines gentrification as a shared struggle. Newark–her beloved hometown–runs through so many of her poems. “Brick city” is where dates happen in parking lots near “the best soft serve spot down by the shore,” where white bodies rub up against black and brown at the “grocery store, salon, laundromat, crosswalk,” where workers “exhausted, scratching at our scarred/ etching” egg on the Apocalypse, or whatever great force might restore equality to our society. Newark stretches between every foot, corner, and intersection of her poems. She writes,

“I won’t know until later, but this is the worst kind of ache
I will receive from a boy, the kind of surprised pulse you feel
Your first licensed drive down Lake Street, pumping your breaks
As a neighborhood toddler wedges his way onto the curb”

Sadly, like so many other artists, González bears witness to the gentrification of her city–caught in the outer rings of Manhattan, whose infrastructure and prosperity increasingly works against its inhabitants. This battle for the soul of her city, as for many of us, unfolds in broad daylight as families, forever promised prosperity, are pushed further and further from the places they helped build. She writes,

“Brick City babies came out their mothers shaped like stone,
The kind of red that takes root in skyscrapers,
Kind of uncrumbled piece you think deserves the paint”

Whether erupting into sorrow and joy or pouring over the moments of definition and pointlessness that compose urban life, her poetry brings the right amount of rowdiness and compassion to this critique. She describes gentrification–a byproduct of capitalism that casts both the image of prosperity and feelings of devastation–as “a white world that wants to eat itself godless….”

The purpose of Gonzalez’ poetic debut is to realize her own convictions about love,  fight for her city, and, lastly, realize her own relationship to Puerto Rican culture. Through such sustaining verses, she calls upon her tribe. Toward the end of Wild Invocations, her words conjure a boricua whose devotion to their children, their homeland, and their low-paying American jobs is supernatural; a boricua whose urban offspring, in turn, rebel against the very conditions their parents endured while evoking the name of their ancestors. In “Los Boricuas,” she writes,

“…Fireflies in the night,
Little lights shining through industrial windows
Puerto Ricans are really amazing creatures,
trading fantastic phosphorescent island bays
For diving in dumpsters”

As represented in her poetry, her people can warm up a space with their style, understand pretense to be presumptuous, and turn a broken soul, system, or basement into something good. They work hard in order to enjoy themselves easily. Through song and dance, they suspend the outside world which–for its heavy debts, wide divides, and hot and violent feuds–is all too real. Although it is exciting to see this poet represent her culture, it is all the more exciting to see in the final poems, her contribute her own fire to it. Inspired by Nina Simone and Billie Holiday, González continues this civil and aesthetic tradition as she bears witness to the harm inflicted onto Puerto Rico. Invoking Simone’s “Strange Fruit,” she writes,

“This slow death is a favor
(they say)
I hear humming now as if
that will ease my freak
-ish thrashing”

From Wild Invocations, the poet emerges as a proud and woke daughter of Puerto Rico, a fearless New Jersey girl fighting for herself and her city. While many of the poems are about love, gentrification, and the boriqua, others have an energy of their own. “Vodka Invocation” is funny, sad, and relatable–all that one can hope for on a Friday night with friends. “Suitcase” depicts the threadbare interludes of longing commonplace in adult life. In “Mangled Mischief” and “Sonnet Invocation for Tricksters,” González uses pop imagery to shred stereotypes. Her struggle has made her poetry no less soulful. Her unrelenting passion makes these lines glow. She writes,

“I want to brand somewhere you’ll never forget,
Body, I promise you
I can change”

Her urbane metaphors render our hyper lives in 360 degrees. Her rhythms prod us to think fast and love slow. These are poems for the party animal and the lovesick; poems to dress our wounds with; poems that, like the sky, can withstand what is elemental or evil, and still produce beauty and wonder. These are poems to return to, anthems to rally around, songs of a love we feel.

Joshua Escobar is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, Bareback Nightfall (Noemi Press). He teaches at Santa Barbara City College.