Tripas: Poems

by Brandon Som

With Tripas , Brandon Som follows up his award-winning debut with a book of poems built out of a multicultural, multigenerational childhood home, in which he celebrates his Chicana grandmother, who worked nights on the assembly line at Motorola, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran the family corner store. Enacting a cómo se dice poetics, a dialogic poem-making that inventively listens to heritage languages and transcribes family memory, Som participates in a practice of mem(oir), placing each poem’s ear toward a confluence of history, labor, and languages, while also enacting a kind of “telephone” between cultures. Invested in the circuitry and circuitous routes of migration and labor, Som’s lyricism weaves together the narratives of his transnational communities, bringing to light what is overshadowed in the reckless transit of global capitalism and imagining a world otherwise—one attuned to the echo in the hecho, the oracle in the órale.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Adult, Asian American, China

104 pages, Hardcover

Published May 15, 2024

Reviews

[Ria]

UPDATE: THIS JUST WON THE PULITZER PRIZE!!!! BRANDON SOM I LOVE YOU, YOU ARE AN ICON!!!

pre-review: my professor wrote a poetry collection so now i have to read it🤭

[Erica Naone · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled through this book to the point that I wondered if I had lost all reading momentum. But I don’t think that’s because this is a bad book. I think it’s a very, very demanding book.

First, let’s talk about what is really special. This is absolutely a book that only this author could have written. It is about his mixed Chinese-Mexican heritage, from a lens of the U.S. born child of immigrants, with a lot of attention to the sort of factory work that low wage workers from both countries of his roots frequently participate in. He is particularly interested in a Motorola factory and all the impacts it created (on people’s lives, on the environment, etc). He talks a lot about neighborhoods, about placing himself in them, about going back to “home” countries that do and don’t feel like home.

When I say it like that, I love this book. The ground it covers is so fascinating to me and I so admire an author telling their unique story.

What got me stuck though was that there is a spectrum of how much the author expects the reader to work and this book is pretty far to one side. There are a lot of references to electronic circuits. I think understanding them (I don’t) would make the reading experience so much richer. The author makes references to aspects of language in Spanish, Chinese and English. I had to look things up even in English, and as far as the others, I ironically have some Spanish and no Chinese (I am part Chinese, that’s why it’s ironic). I knew stuff was flying over my head. The end notes make frequent references to books. The books referred to seem really valuable but the author does not help you out. He doesn’t describe what was said in them, it’s more like he refers to them in a way you would appreciate if you had read them.

I ended up feeling like this was a hard book to appreciate without a lot of background. I also often lost track of the poems - like I struggled to go with the author associating one idea to the other. I also struggled to find that spark of relatability which is what motivates me personally to read poems (I feel like this is sort of basic of me, but it is a big factor in poems I enjoy). Oddly, it felt like there was a lot I should find relatable, as someone who also has a multi ethnic identity and a lot of interest in language.

I wonder if this was just not the time for this book for me? Like maybe in a few years I will have learned more about poetry and can try again

[Elsa Triin · Rating 3 out of 5]

My notes are in a notebook in another town so this review must wait a day. But ayy, read the 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry!

[Harry Palacio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Old Chinese adage about diodes and triads with Mexican heritage where the translation to kung fu is what you practice heavily- something not to overlook a jamble of riffs on the circuitry of family and ancestry

[Wendelle]

a Pulitzer Prize Winner and a palpably powerful poetry collection, Brandon Som examines his fused heritage of a Chinese-American father and a Mexican-American mother while also tracing and demonstrating the labor lines of a Motorola factory

[Oscreads · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this great!

[Stacey D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through his poetry, a blending of multiple languages and picturesque imagery, the author connects us to his colorful multiracial Chinese-American and Mexican heritage. My favorite in this collection was Sirenas del Aire, 1958, but I enjoyed them all.

[Rodney Dailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best works of contemporary poetry I've read in years. At first, I thought there may be a language barrier (I don't know Spanish or Chinese), but this is a work concerned with etymology and phonetic sound, feeling and grounding in an American experience of "mixed pieces." Here, is the circuitry of American cruelty and tenderness, "A Chichimeca woman on a comet tail of field corn . . . the unrequited man turned dove with grief." I don't often feel moved to 'review' a book on this site, and I may not do another one of these for a while, but it seems that at times "Tripas" seems to knit us open in reverse, speaking of the "braids" of factory work, the "braids" of mass producing circuitboards, the "braids" of human communication: "What wires a poem's enjambment, its bandwidth between, like a field of hidden ribbon?"

[Gregory Duke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unsuccessful. The form does not appear to inform much of the content (or vice versa), and Som's language, as the collection goes on, reads as dryly redundant rather than evocatively echoing and circles around the same subjects about identity and family and language and diaspora and the dissolution of the world (in the current white-supremacist, capitalist, colonial hellscape), which all leads to a book without many memorable lines/images/turns and, instead, a tawdry work of half-baked reminiscences and cerebral practices that rarely plumb any sort of depth.

[Anthony Conty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Upon completing 'Tripas: Poems' by Brandon Som, the recent recipient of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, I was captivated by the unique blend of Spanglish and multiculturalism that permeates the book. Drawing inspiration from the rich narratives of his Chinese and Mexican grandparents, the poems, while not always immediately apparent to a non-poetry enthusiast like myself, still managed to evoke a powerful sense of nostalgia.

Dr. Brandon Som, a distinguished poet with an M.F.A. from Pitt and a U.S.C. Doctorate in Literature and Creative Writing, infuses his work with a deeply personal connection. Having resided in Squirrel Hill, he beautifully captures the essence of the West. Yet, his poignant exploration of his family's struggles and their use of ancient technology and techniques to secure a better future for their children and descendants truly resonates. The poet's invitation to readers to share his journey of understanding is a compelling aspect of his work.

While I found the subject matter compelling, poetry was also challenging to interpret. However, Dr. Som's constant discussion of Spanish phonetics and idiosyncrasies made the work more accessible and enjoyable for me. His grandparents' occupations feature prominently in his writing, serving as the ultimate show of gratitude. The flow of language is lyrical and rhythmic, creating a conversational feel that reassures and comforts the reader.

I'm still deciding whether to recommend this book. It's a short and easy read, but it may not appeal to fiction or nonfiction readers who are not already fans of poetry.  I enjoyed the stories of his family and the honesty with which he presented his life. My yearly vacation with poetry was successful. I would love to hear your stories about poetry and what has worked for you in the past, as I doubt my inherent intelligence.

[Featherbooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Spaide in Poetry Foundation's review https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr... writes of this book:
Aristotle, Li Po, Ezra Pound: these are among the cited sources of Brandon SomThe Tribute Horse (2014), whose textual collages map the arduous passage of Chinese migrants and poetry to North America. With Tripas: PoemsTripas (2023), Brandon Som turns his attention to histories, plural: toxic dumping in Phoenix, Arizona; a father’s “nine-year fight with cancer”; a Chicana grandmother’s work inspecting circuits for the earliest Motorola cellphones. Those latter devices are forerunners to Brandon Som’s poetic instrument, his “Teléfono Roto”—literally, a broken telephone; idiomatically, the children’s game telephone. Both are ways of communicating through mishearing, translating signal and noise into surprises of sense and sound..."cries Llorona from those little phones inside our pockets" and Motorola moved to Guadalajara after the manufacturer was fined and their Phoenix location was declared a Superfund site.
Very moving and powerful verse.

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully inventive multilingual sound exploration telling of a lineage linked by a sort of circuitry. The way form and language play with mixing, of culture, identity, and understanding are excellent and rare.

from “Chino”:
“The vowel was spell: an i that might we,
an i that echoes how were seen & see.
Eyedentity. Ay Dios, she exclaimed…”

from “Close Reading”:
“… In Spanish, Nana tells me

hope & waiting are one word.”

from “Sirenas del Aire, 1958”:
“a beseeching or thinking that the mermaids,
with their knowledge of tides & the late
summer’s phosphorescence, might say something
about the startling beauty of betweenness.”
(AH! I wrote a poem after I read that one)

from “Half”:
“…Does knowing where the halfing starts

bring us closer to whole?”

from “Super Mercado Lee Hou”:
“Could I sign my name
that crossing, that chiasmus
of exile, or simply share
a night’s receipts— its archive
of saluditos, pack of Pall Malls,
tins of potted meat?”

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The words feel good together, even when I don't know the language.

Transmitter
...
Hearing, it's said, is touch at a distance.
Ola is amp & trough. Frequency=waves
passing a given point. My nana's voice
Is creosote & Parliaments--tenor and rasp
that side-winds cell towers over chevron
of ocotillo, through ironwood and arroya,

Moving in the megahertz her hands made.

[Kayla Rakita · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t read much poetry, but I love when it’s written like this. It was just as much memoir as it was poetry. Growing up and living in Phoenix and speaking some Spanish make the experience of reading this even more meaningful, particularly in the history and local landmarks/imagery mentioned and the way English words take on a new light through Spanish, like in this line: “The ear’s yearning, oír in memoir”. I loved this collection and will read it again one day.

[Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting book of poetry I will probably come back to in order to reread so I can digest it more. Som's use of Spanish throughout out the poems to explore family and identity was really compelling and beautiful. There were also a lot of poems I loved, especially ones reflecting on labor / his family.

[Jesse Level · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is poetry that’s full of playful phrasings and musical rhythms, dense in its use of languages, obviously personal, sometimes inscrutable.

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best volumes of poetry I've ever read. It is a combination of true word craft and memoir/memorial, making so many multicultural linguistic and spiritual connections from recalling the author's memories and personal connections to the lives of his family members. It truly outshines so much other modern poetry I have read. I read a library copy, will probably purchase to read again.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A worthy prize-winner chock-full of brilliant sonic cadences and meditations on the riches of language overlays between Cantonese, Spanish, and English. It's alive with puns on so many levels. Interesting, too, are the images and narrative arcs that interpret connectivity through wires and technology. We get scenes of family members working in a Motorola factory, making an interesting sort of blue-collar working back-drop to extremely elevated academic references.

And perhaps that is my one criticism--accessibility. This work highly-accomplished, literary, and often obscure. Some lines are so dense that even shortening the length doesn't do enough to give breathing room to readers. I, mostly, feel rewarded when reading this, but the audience is niche. I would probably have changed the order of some of the poems and sections. The first several poems in the first section are more cryptic than most of what follows.

Still, an impressive blend of sounds, languages, images, and perspectives.

[Ashley Grins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hella nice dude & a hella nice book of poems!!!

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good collection of meticulously constructed poems. I did find myself pulled out of several poems because of a lot of external references.

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

THERE ARE ENOUGH young American poets working through the complexities of their identities that another volume of poems "built out of a multicultural, multigenerational home" (as the back cover puts it) would not necessarily get me to plop down $19.95 and start reading... but this one got a strong review from Stephanie Burt in the LRB, and that makes a difference. If Stephanie Burt says, "plop down your $19.95 and start reading," I am likely to say, "well, okay."

And Stephanie Burt is right again--this is a fine book.

For one thing, Som's identity is complex in a relatively unusual way. He has a Chicana grandmother who worked the night shift at a Motorola assembly line until the factory was moved to Mexico, and Chinese-American grandparents who ran a corner store. Each strand, on its own, conjures up a relatively familiar kind of story, but the interaction of the two has a particular twenty-first century fizz to it, a different poignancy (see, please, "Close Reading").

That one grandmother's job involves circuitboards generates a cluster of electronic imagery that becomes a way of talking about how poems come into being:

Tuning not lute but car radio, Cocteau's Orpheus
copies the broadcasts from a netherworld for verses--
his muse a circuitry my grandmother inspected

nights at Motorola. Before her shift, she put me to bed,
laid down beside me and smoked Parliaments--
each drag like a tower light to planes overhead. ("Antenna")


Electricity makes a useful figure for how poetry moves through the world, if you think about it--operating in some boundary between the material and the immaterial, both controllable (circuits) and uncontrollable (lightning), powerful but visible only in its effects. (see also "Resistors.")

Som's inwardness with the grain of language is what really keeps the book moving. In "Tattoo," someone tells of the word "maseros" tattooed on her brothers' hands, which is not exactly "mesero" (waiter) or "masera" (a kneading trough) or "macero" (a mace bearer)--but what is it? does it "sound a resistance"?

Addendum or
annotation, their maseros revised
the sentence written on their body.
I carry that archive--what's stored
without inventory: a leaf, an aleph;
a casita in husk; a feminine eye inside
hoja: maize, maíz, masa--a maze
on fingertips. Hear the word again--
at its center a gristmill of cicada,
a mesquite both vessel and wishbone.

[Spencer Reads Everything]

Brandon Som’s Tripas: Poems is a stunning meditation on identity, migration, and language, where cultural memory is delicately intertwined with personal reflection. The collection's contemporary style may not appeal to everyone, as it leans heavily on complex metaphors and fragmented narratives. What I found especially striking was Som’s deliberate use of multiple languages, including Chinese characters, which remain inherently unknowable to most readers. This linguistic layering reflects the core theme of identity—an ever-evolving, elusive concept that can’t be fully understood from the outside.

As a Chinese-Mexican-American poet, Som examines the multiple facets of his heritage, allowing language to serve as a metaphor for the way cultural identities interlace and diverge. As someone who doesn’t share his cultural background, I found this approach powerful and moving. His experiences, though not entirely accessible to me, evoke a profound sense of admiration for the complexity of identity. The unknowability of certain aspects—like the Chinese characters—mirrors the intricacies of heritage and history, both personal and collective.

Tripas is challenging yet rewarding. Som’s ability to blend English, Spanish, and Chinese, along with his fluid use of form and metaphor, demands active engagement. But for those who are willing to explore these layered dimensions, it offers an enriching experience. The book's strength lies in its ability to make the reader reflect on their own identity while acknowledging the depth of someone else’s, which might remain partially out of reach. I recommend this book for those that want to engage with questions of identity and can handle contemporary poetry. I don't recommend this book for people that think all poetry should rhyme or who are afraid to read a book by someone with a complicated identity. For more check out my YouTube review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O81tf...

[Amy]

A read full of translations and decoding, hitting the internet to unpuzzle many of the Spanish and Chinese terms. The images, language, and themes Som is obsessed with and which he returns to repeatedly were easily spotted in this collection. Sometimes these repetitions felt rehashed instead of recast. 

There were unfamiliar terms/cultural practices in "Qingming" and "Tattoo" that I felt like no amount of Googling would unlock, and erudite concepts in "Diagram" and "Antenna" that flew above my head. But there were really delightful/musical lines in the latter:

One grandmother with Vicks, one with Tiger Balm,
rubbed fires of camphor & mint, old poultices,
//
into my chest: their palms kneading & wet with salve,
//
its menthols, to strip the chaff & rattle in a night wheeze.
Can you hear their lullabies? One like the dicho,
//
chiquito pero picoso, one in all five tones of village dialect--
//
with wish-hum for thresholds, they put to bed each name
for the night.

Favorite poems:

"Inventory," with my favorite lines:
The -ah was more song
& she sang beyond the name.
/
...It was whistle house,
a star's spur, & it could scold
from the meat counter,
where she priced the chuck
with a grease pen tied to the scale.
/
Though not on a map
its lilt echoed geographies
& she hummed it
simply over a thin broth,
simmered daylong
& suckled on a short rib

"Qingming" -- I appreciate the attempt to weave in connections of Eric Garner and George Floyd to the corner store the speaker's father ran.

"My Father's Perm"

"Gramophone"

"Novena," especially poems 1 and 4 in the series

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is a good mind here, but the poems just do not hit for me.

I found the &s, which seem to be something of a signature for him, to be distracting and gimmicky.

Mixing languages too much is just a bad idea in poetry. My Spanish is decent; I know the meaning of most of the words without having to look them up. But as a non-native speaker, I have no connection to the words. They are not wired up to the pathways of my brain the way that words in my native language are. This is why I have always believed that reading translated poetry, or reading poetry in a language that is not your native language, is little more than an academic exercise. You can perhaps appreciate the ideas, but the poetry will fail to be truly provocative because the words will not be wired up to places, moments, images in the reader's life. They will not trip those associations the way words in your native language will, though there may be pretentious academics and poetry critics that fool themselves into believing otherwise.

If you are a Chinese Mexican American who grew up hearing and speaking all three of these languages throughout your life, these poems will really work for you. But by definition, this means the poems have limited appeal. For the rest of us, this is mostly an academic study, with an interesting perspective to be sure. If you are one of the rest of us, and you think you can get the most out of this as poetry, then either you can do something that I cannot (certainly a possibility), or you are fooling yourself into believing that a dictionary can be a lossless intermediary in poetry.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I stumbled across Brandon Som’s Tripas while browsing the new books section at the library. I was not familiar with Som, but, as a designer, the book’s cover was intriguing, and, as a poet, how could I pass on a book that was both a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize?

Som is of Mexican and Chinese heritage and sinuously blends the olio of his multicultural upbringing, infusing his poems with a linguistic playfulness as he celebrates, and laments, his multigenerational childhood. That playfulness often comes at the expense of understanding, however. For example, “… Li Po of cuidados & chingados. The rascuache Li Po / of cochinero, of makeshift. Li Po of Saltillo tiles, / terracotta—tierra mia—awaiting square feet.” I can’t deny the delightful dance of alliteration but without a modest grasp of the Spanish language (or a willingness to regularly look up the translation of words and phrases), the reader is frequently left guessing as to what’s meant.

I expected—or was at least hoping for—something more akin to Jericho Brown’s also-Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Tradition: unflinching, intimate, powerful. By contrast, Tripas feels flat, clinical, as if Som was simply reporting the facts, however lyrically, with whatever obvious skill, from some objective remove. I wanted to feel his heart on the page. Instead, I got history.

[Josh Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm blown away. This was the second book of poetry I read for my ENGL 383 class, but I went very in depth for this one. I spent probably 10-12 hours going through it, googling every word and reference I didn't know (which was a lot hehe), then read the poems again so it could all come together.

I've read a lot of individual poems for school over the years, but it was so cool to read an entire book that a poet had put together. I have cross-references galore through Som's book, tracking his many mentions of his four grandparents, his father, catholic imagery, Arizona landscape, and electronics. Som explored his mixed heritage (both Chinese and Chicano) in many of the poems, many of the poems rife with Spanish words intermixed with the English. The book was full of memories, sensations, research, and communications with family members. Really, the whole thing seemed like a love letter to his family.

I had the chance to hear Brandon read some of these at a reading at UW (my professor was one of the five Pullitzer judges that won Som the prize for his book), and I got my copy of Tripas signed by him. He is a very kind, soft-spoken man. It was incredible to go through his work at such a close level after the live reading. 

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

From an autobiographical and subject matter perspective, this book is extremely interesting - using circuitry as an image and metaphor from the author’s grandmother who worked at a Motorola factory, and cultural foods from their father who worked at a corner store, Brandon Som has created a thematically linked set of poems that borrows extensively from other languages. This was all very interesting to me. Where I got lost was how many of these poems got bogged down in lists. This made many of the poems demanding to read without offering the magic that poetic phrasing and pacing can offer. It felt less like a guided tour and more a procession of artifacts for the viewer to derive meaning from. That being said - I still enjoyed it! Realistically I would give this a 3/5, but I left this wanting to see more from the author, so lets’s jack up your Goodreads average review score a little on this!

[Greg Burrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I randomly stumbled across this book and we delighted by the wonderful collection that explores the poet's multicultural history and search for identity. Not only could I relate to these words, I feel the author must have had a similar upbringing because I knew all his references from Li Po to "Always and Forever" to Al Jebr to Pauline Oliveros to Michael Faraday and beyond. But they aren't the references of a poet trying to show off, they're the references of somebody who grew up in the late 20th century and absorbed various histories in a fast-changing high-tech world. Brandon Som's poems often read like stream of consciousness: the lines dance and skip and seem to almost careen out of control, I felt a giddiness and the room spun and I needed to catch my breath.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Personal and personable poems about family, grandparents, and cultural melange, with enough space for César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, Li Po, and Pauline Oliveros.

Too many puns for my liking—enough for groans in three languages. Waves and circuits make recurring thematic appearances, most dramatically in “Tattoo,” where a cousin’s undulations “made a sea on his stomach/rip curl, made a moon/over his breaking boy’s body,” while doing the robot. Lovely images mix with the grotesque, like a father “in a swaying/two-step over the meat slicer, his right hand beneath/butcher paper held out almost lovingly, as if cradling/someone’s head & not just catching slices of ham.” Strong, too, when about art (often); “Sirenas del aire, 1958,” about a Dadaesque collage and whether mermaids are supposed to be sexy, was a favorite. And what better description Orozco’s depiction of human joints than “lug nut hips//& kneecaps”?

[Rachel Baack · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this collection of poems, Brandon Som shares the stories of his parents and grandparents—one side descended from Chinese immigrants and the other from Mexican immigrants—and explores what it means for an individual to hold multiple identities, for a family to relate to one another, and for a people to experience injustice and hardship at the hands of racism.

This is a very intellectually challenging collection to read; you’ll definitely want to have Google translate handy. My favorite poems in the collection were “Teléfono Roto,” “Twin Plant,” “My Father’s Perm,” and “Super Mercado Lee Hou.”