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Wet Land
Poetry. "Lucas de Lima's stunning book affected me so profoundly at all the stages of reading it, encountering it--before it was a book and afterwards, when it was. In the work of this extraordinary writer, the fragment is not an activity of form. It's an activity of evisceration."--Bhanu Kapil
- GenresPoetry
108 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 29, 2015
It's been a long time since I've read something that feels so crucial, so full of guts - literal, imagined, and gnawing away at the cage that is the page. Grief, fury, camp, myth, compassion, and sex come together here in the most incredible ways.
August 18, 2015
I loved this book. weird, heartbreaking, beautiful.
April 14, 2014
The first half of this book is really good. The grief for the friend and how del Mar is able to manifest it in poetry is moving and powerful, and the portrayal of the alligator is weird, bordering on kitsch, but ultimately awesome.
The second half, however,...I don't know. All the stuff about the speaker changing into a bird...I support it but had trouble buying into it. Maybe it was me. The focus (or something) wasn't there, or was different in a way that I couldn't find my way into.
Regardless, a worthwhile read. And hey, it's from Action Books, and they're ALWAYS putting out interesting stuff.
The second half, however,...I don't know. All the stuff about the speaker changing into a bird...I support it but had trouble buying into it. Maybe it was me. The focus (or something) wasn't there, or was different in a way that I couldn't find my way into.
Regardless, a worthwhile read. And hey, it's from Action Books, and they're ALWAYS putting out interesting stuff.
June 24, 2014
lucas de lima is one of the most important people fighting for poetry. he is why i feel brave enough.
December 14, 2024
There are two statements made in the readings that I equate, which perfectly describe the
main Necropastoral aspect of Wet Land. The first is in the article: “The Necropastoral is also,
then, a method of reading for resemblances, for uncanny channels and doubles which leap across
the supposed sureties of national and linguistic and formal boundaries and break literature’s
affirmative and humanist contract...” Mcsweeney is describing how the Necropastoral breaks
with typical expectations of literature’s goals of portraying ‘the human experience.’ Which De
Lima acknowledges in the publishing-feedback part of the book, when one of the reviewers says
“I’m more interested in learning about this person than the details with the alligator and so on.
And forgive me– it almost seems cartoonish.” Here the reviewer is clearly delineating De Lima’s
tension between what we expect a book about such a heavy topic to give us, and how the focus
on the Alligator as the obsession of the language breaks the “humanist contract” by way of the
uncanny, as described by Mcsweeney.
To me, this was the most impactful aspect of the book. Because from the beginning we
knew the story is about his friend who was killed by a monster alligator, we go into the narration
with already such intense anticipation, unlike a more straightforward piece of literature where
you are reading to find out who dies, and how. De Lima then takes these expectations the reader
is set up with and hammers down the Alligator instead of redeeming his best friend’s story. This
even makes the feeling of death more potent, because we don’t have a possible route to
redemption of Ana Maria, instead we just have the Alligator as celebrity, and the same moment
of death over and over again.
In the poem United Animals (37) the speaker is romantically involved with the Alligator,
and is set at the cave-funeral for Ana Maria, that then turns into an orgy between many animal
species. I can hear the reviewers say something like “this is an insensitive poem” yet I believe De
Lima is very respectful and troubled by the death of his friend, but he doesn’t owe that
therapising to us in his book. Instead he uses the Necropastoral approach to portray and comment
on our governments diplomatic relationships, specifically the UN, by creating a caricature of the
best friend and the killer corruptly holding hands in an eco-magical world. Like this, De Lima
lets us assume that he cared for his friend implicitly, but in the language of the book, we see the
uncanny wrestle with the world that killed her (the eco), and subsequently commodified her
death (mankind).
In the latter half of the book, the interaction with the Alligator becomes more solidified in
the erotic. There are a lot of mentions of bodily fluids, as well as sexuality and even STDs. In
Bug-Chaser (91) De Lima describes a scene of a blowjob given to the speaker by the Alligator,
and after the Alligator puts his mouth on him, he says “For months I fear I am POZ” which is a
crescendo moment after previous poems set up the conversation about HIV and the death it
caused in the 80’s (“”Silence” = Breath” (89)). The Alligator killed his best friend by putting his
mouth on her, and now he is worried it will do the same to him. He also uses the necropastoral in
this moment to muddy the image of a fairly common encounter between gay males into one
charged with death, historical weight, emotional turbulence: “THE GATOR MAN BOBS AT
MY CROCODILE TEARS...”
main Necropastoral aspect of Wet Land. The first is in the article: “The Necropastoral is also,
then, a method of reading for resemblances, for uncanny channels and doubles which leap across
the supposed sureties of national and linguistic and formal boundaries and break literature’s
affirmative and humanist contract...” Mcsweeney is describing how the Necropastoral breaks
with typical expectations of literature’s goals of portraying ‘the human experience.’ Which De
Lima acknowledges in the publishing-feedback part of the book, when one of the reviewers says
“I’m more interested in learning about this person than the details with the alligator and so on.
And forgive me– it almost seems cartoonish.” Here the reviewer is clearly delineating De Lima’s
tension between what we expect a book about such a heavy topic to give us, and how the focus
on the Alligator as the obsession of the language breaks the “humanist contract” by way of the
uncanny, as described by Mcsweeney.
To me, this was the most impactful aspect of the book. Because from the beginning we
knew the story is about his friend who was killed by a monster alligator, we go into the narration
with already such intense anticipation, unlike a more straightforward piece of literature where
you are reading to find out who dies, and how. De Lima then takes these expectations the reader
is set up with and hammers down the Alligator instead of redeeming his best friend’s story. This
even makes the feeling of death more potent, because we don’t have a possible route to
redemption of Ana Maria, instead we just have the Alligator as celebrity, and the same moment
of death over and over again.
In the poem United Animals (37) the speaker is romantically involved with the Alligator,
and is set at the cave-funeral for Ana Maria, that then turns into an orgy between many animal
species. I can hear the reviewers say something like “this is an insensitive poem” yet I believe De
Lima is very respectful and troubled by the death of his friend, but he doesn’t owe that
therapising to us in his book. Instead he uses the Necropastoral approach to portray and comment
on our governments diplomatic relationships, specifically the UN, by creating a caricature of the
best friend and the killer corruptly holding hands in an eco-magical world. Like this, De Lima
lets us assume that he cared for his friend implicitly, but in the language of the book, we see the
uncanny wrestle with the world that killed her (the eco), and subsequently commodified her
death (mankind).
In the latter half of the book, the interaction with the Alligator becomes more solidified in
the erotic. There are a lot of mentions of bodily fluids, as well as sexuality and even STDs. In
Bug-Chaser (91) De Lima describes a scene of a blowjob given to the speaker by the Alligator,
and after the Alligator puts his mouth on him, he says “For months I fear I am POZ” which is a
crescendo moment after previous poems set up the conversation about HIV and the death it
caused in the 80’s (“”Silence” = Breath” (89)). The Alligator killed his best friend by putting his
mouth on her, and now he is worried it will do the same to him. He also uses the necropastoral in
this moment to muddy the image of a fairly common encounter between gay males into one
charged with death, historical weight, emotional turbulence: “THE GATOR MAN BOBS AT
MY CROCODILE TEARS...”
June 9, 2021
:-O ,,, ;-(
jesus. i was so unprepared for that. i think i will j write my undergrad thesis on this book
jesus. i was so unprepared for that. i think i will j write my undergrad thesis on this book
October 24, 2015
Lucas de Lima lost a friend to a gruesome death, and both his friend and the alligator haunt his poetry collection Wet Land. De Lima's poems reach far beyond his grief, however, exploring identity, religion, new mythology, writing and book creation, and many other topics. His friend is often there, a ghostly presence, a hopeful and powerful totem. When the book reaches its emotional identity crisis in the middle, with a transcript of a panelists critiquing, often negatively, the Wet Land manuscript, de Lima seems to tap into her essence and his own strength to reemerge with even more assertiveness. What the panelists took exception to proves to be the collections strength: de Lima finds his identity by exploring and transforming multiple identities. Ana Maria, the gator, or a bird, de Lima's poems are messy, sad, hopeful, loud, and heading somewhere cosmic.
December 29, 2014
O CHRIST this book is so good--the way it creates a violent/loving/swarthy vision of death and then, halfway through, rips apart the speaker, the subject, the elegiac form, the text itself. Amazing. One of my fave books of 2014.
August 2, 2016
Insane, but in a good way.
Read
September 22, 2015Kinda conceptualist.
But really, so so so so good.
But really, so so so so good.
February 2, 2017
(3.5 stars)
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews