Rotura by José Angel Araguz Reviewed by Staci Halt
Rotura by José Angel Araguz Reviewed by Staci Halt
Published: March 2022
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Length: 70 pages
ISBN: 978-1-62557-033-8
Reviewed by: Staci Halt
Outcomes of Having-been-in-danger: José Angel Araguz’s Rotura
In a letter to his wife, Rilke describes a work of art as “the outcome of having been in danger.” If we take Rilke’s interpretation as instructive, poetry born of danger can be said to behave like a body’s natural immune response to attack. In this way, a poet writes in response to threat, much like a spider on its suddenly torn web. It has no choice but to repair as a condition of being a spider; a matter of impulse and survival, and the web—in its patterns and disruptions of patterns—is the resulting art. Rotura by José Angel Araguz is a work that engages with trauma, identity fragmented by displacement, and loss of physical and emotional safety. The elusiveness of wholeness and healing, and coping with continued present danger are the undercurrents of his poems, and yet there is also throughout a sense of play, the wresting-back of control, and music.
Synchroneity of past, present, and future self is one of the shuttles at work in the weaving of Rotura. The first poem titled “A Question Before the Election” leaves little doubt as to which election serves as entry and exit point of the book; the ending poem titled “Questions After the Election,” offering an uneasy symmetry. One might (dangerously) assume they know what they’ll encounter between these bookends, but Araguz avoids falling into and staying on familiar ground. When translated from Spanish, rotura is a noun meaning break, or, depending on how its used, breakage, rift, or crack. The title makes us wonder what has been broken or what is breaking, and the poems that follow sometimes answer, sometimes restate the question, as well as ask others. The book announces from its onset I am here to take up space, as the first poem spans a heady fourteen pages while notably, some of these contain few lines and sometimes a single line, like the opening: “my mother asks if I’ve heard of the KKK—” which stands alone, black against the stark white space of the page.
Araguz alternates between English and Spanish as the poem continues, inviting us to listen with duality, experience schism in the emotional complexity of straddling two worlds, two identities, and a border between countries. Mid-poem the speaker declares in a pulse measured in single-word lines: “I feel/ failure / desengaño / loss / decepcíon / breakdown / caída / defeat / quebrado / collapse / rotura / frustration / amargura / grief”. As in English, the Spanish words have multiple meanings. Amargura can mean bitter to the taste, and also alludes to the sadness of a broken heart. It is no surprise when the poem spends time in a sort of list. The speaker contends with conflict wherein memory and acute fears collide, asking, “What is it one inventories,/ makes space for,/ stops to see in lists” and “why do I do anything but/ hide and stay quiet…a year later/ I will have been walking/ looking over my shoulder/ for more than thirty years”.
The speaker repeats “my mother asks if I’ve heard of the KKK and I feel the worst has found its way into my palm”, this time conjuring the tangible weight of the threat of violence, a reminder it must be carried; be reckoned with. While a poem simply listing abstractions in a single language may be easily dismissed, Araguz opens a door to interiority. The narrator wonders through the alternating Spanish and English, who am I going to be today? Will he cower “hiding and quiet as my mother asked me to be” or be bold enough, as the speaker is in “Four Dirges,” to address a series of poems about rivers directly to one of the grandfathers of modern poetry, TS Eliot.
The heavy premise of these sonorous, lyrical poems—dirges implying they grapple with death and loss somehow— is rendered conversational and both supplicating and accusatory. The speaker creates a casual intimacy in the changing greetings, first addressing Eliot as Thomas, then Tom, then Tommy, and finally T.
………………………Thomas: it’s true, you don’t know
………………………about God’s beaten and worn
………………………like the space left between
………………………paired jigsaw puzzle pieces
………………………where a child has tried
………………………and tried to force the wrong piece in;
………………………you might’ve known about
………………………gods who linger, who know
………………………lightning bolts, who know bargains
………………………and carry swords, but I think you
………………………lack the capacity to notice
………………………their lack of capacity
………………………to harbor and be a hand
………………………to shade our eyes; shaded now,
………………………you don’t know and died
………………………not knowing the slosh of gods
………………………and the dark gleam of gods
………………………that reflect clean off badges
………………………hot overpaid hearts.
Pound wrote that “rhythm must have meaning” and in the dirge poems the rhythmic patterns of syntax emerge in minimally punctuated run-on sentences, and are audibly shaped through alliteration and assonance. In “Water Dirge” the speaker asks Eliot, “Did you not know…/Before the city lights made us/ forget the stars, and before the desert/ was made a road, and before people crammed/ into trucks and were called cargo,/ called nothing back there, officer, there was water?” The lines cascade in sound reminiscent of moving water, and the speaker repeats phrase patterns, only to break them against devastating moments in scene managing tension and drama.
While fear, grief, family, and identity repeatedly return as does river imagery, the poems do not grow tired as Araguz engages with his primary subjects acrobatically, moving like a photographer by switching the lens of language, and changing the direction he’s aiming the camera. He leaps from vulnerability and self doubt in poems like “Coconut” which ends with the line “I am a question asking itself, my self/whispered by those watching me”, to poems that are defiant like “In the Margins, With Birds,” where the speaker’s voice crackles and pops in tidy couplets steeped in warm internal rhymes:
………………………I am hiding my hands and hoping for stillness.
………………………I am pacing in my blood – the birds want me to run.
………………………It is every morning, 6 a.m., and they shit and laugh
………………………their machine gun chat, cuts of sound swarming.
………………………I am only the archive of this Dawn. When I cough,
………………………birds scatter from the wires like buckshot.
Rotura’s tender poems appear tied to one another through a sense of curiosity, and desire for understanding. “Conditioning (City Study)”, which is one third of a triptych with “Conditioning (Run Study)” and “Conditioning (Air Study)” and are some of my favorites in the book. “City Study” cuts to the heart of Rotura in ending with a question. “… you look up to Hermes/ above Grand Central// his hands frozen mid-wave/ as a forever casting a spell/ over everything that moves.// Conditioning is the voice / you still hear asking:/who the fuck is you?“ Where Rotura’s title begged the question “what is breaking or broken?” the speaker’s desperate, existential question suggests an answer: me.
The canvas of the 2016 election, predicated in part on the villainization of Latinx immigrants, serves to highlight the high stakes as Araguz reveals a Matroshkya-dolled array of bodies within bodies, and layers of fragmented self under the surface of a survival-wrought self. Rotura’s poems are an act of gathering these fragments, even amidst unanswered questions.
José Angel Araguz, Ph.D. is the author of the poetry collections Everything We Think We Hear (Floricanto Press, 2015) and Small Fires (FutureCycle Press, 2017), as well as seven chapbooks. His poetry and prose have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry International, The Acentos Review, and Oxidant | Engine among other places. He is an Assistant Professor at Suffolk University where he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Salamander and is also a faculty member of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program.
Staci Halt is an MFA candidate at Lesley University. Her poems were longlisted for Palette Poetry‘s Love & Eros Prize (2022), and her work can be found in McSweeny’s and in Salamander Magazine.
26 October 2022
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