Speaking con su Sombra Review by Mary Robles

Speaking con su Sombra 

by Adrian Ernesto Cepeda

review by Mary Robles

ISBN: 9781737992707

Publisher: Alegria Publishing

Publication Date: 9/29/2021

Page Count: 136

What is a welcome divergence from our impersonal and distanced modern culture? It could be remembrance; entering into grief without shame, and sharing its colors and intimacy. This is what Los Angeles poet Adrian Ernesto Cepeda offers in his bilingual book of remembrance poems, Speaking con su Sombra, by Alegria Publishing (2021). Written after the death of his beloved mother, with whom the speaker shares a remarkably intense spiritual and mental bond, the poems reflect the process of grief. They’re cyclical, vulnerable, and intimate. 

I first encountered Cepeda through Luna Luna Magazine, an online journal devoted to magic and healing, and I’ve since found him to be an engaged, active, and kind writer and colleague. I learned he was writing about devising a new way to communicate with his mother, who passed away in 2017—the same year my own beloved father died abruptly. What I found in Sombra were heartrending nuances I knew well. 

The poems span the time before, during, and after the death of the poet’s mother. The speaker in Sombra is almost transfixed by the intensity of the loss, and exists locked in a cyclic dance with the actuality of the “before” and “after” timeframes in which his mother was there and then gone. For many of us who’ve experienced the traumatic deaths of loved ones, the content is deeply familiar, yet affirmative, as it strives to impart new light on the chaos of loss. Could we really learn to “speak” with our departed in a new way? Do their spirits stay in some form, if we make them welcome? To the speaker of Sombra, while nonetheless shattered by his grief, there is no question.

The bilingual lengua throughout the poems serves an almost secret language between mother and son. The opening poem “Mami Rose in the Sky” recounts her last moments on earth as she ascends “from her hospital sheets” into the “cielo sky.” In “Every Day I Touch Her Crystal” the supernatural connection after death allows the speaker to physically possess and wield benevolence and gratitude through his connection with his mother’s spirit, as he continuously reopens, like prismatic light, “the gift of today.” “Driving Us Back to the Hospital [in Joe’s Car],” explores the confusing twilight between pain and humor, and the brothers find themselves “howling together” with laughter before the death, in the strange hysteria of trauma-fatigue. I think this poem is where Cepeda truly begins to break open the subject matter; it has an edge and wildness, and I get the sense that the writer has other layers of this experience yet to reveal. I’d be interested in reading more work from Cepeda in this spirit of daring and innovation. Truly throughout Sombra, he faces his pain with honesty, humor, and tenderness. 

These gentle poems are arresting because they impart innocence and purity to a rite of passage that is unique to each of us. They temper the shock of unthinkable loss, and its heartless finality, with the implausible resilience of psychic love. At a time when many of us are collectively lost and perhaps spellbound by our own mystifying grief, Speaking con su Sombra is a poignant example of the grounding power of honesty and faith. 

Adrian Ernesto Cepeda is the author of So Many Flowers, So Little Time from Red Mare Press, Flashes & Verses… Becoming Attractions from Unsolicited Press, Between the Spine from Picture Show Press and La Belle Ajar & We Are the Ones Possessed from CLASH Books.

Mary Robles is a writer from El Paso, TX. She was a featured poet in The Emily Dickinson Museum’s 2021 “Phosphorescence” reading series, and is judging proposals this year. Her poems have appeared in The Rio Grande Review, Salt Hill Journal, Strange Horizons, and are forthcoming in Luna Luna Magazine. 

18 May 2022