Remains

by Jesus Castillo

Jesús Castillo has created a sprawling contemporary epic that channels the mighty voices of the past (Ovid, Sappho) into a plainspoken song of our times. In a deft, generous style, Castillo takes hold of the stuff of our everyday lives and converts it into modern manna. The book is lovingly relentless, quietly piercing. It is a terrifyingly recognizable call: it is filled with all of our voices, our panic, our modern love, our screens, our roommate’s cough, our melting icebergs, our planes and malls and frailties. Castillo writes,

This is a test. A set of margins created
for company. For waiting in train stations
or asking a stranger the time. You’re allowed
to freak out this much only. There’s a green car
parked outside, by the curb, near the bike racks.
An old man is asking people to put
change in his plastic cup, and I remember
my name contains both my father’s and
grandfather’s stories. The table I’m sitting at
is made of steel and marble. It’s cold and it’s
spring. In the song on the radio, a noise …

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Hardcover

Published January 19, 2016

Reviews

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some things are quietly beautiful in ways that defy explanation. This collection is one long meditation on living; it is as plain and elegant as the light from the moon on a winter night. "In winter, regrets become icicles that drop in our sleep." The quiet presence of love, the dream-like landscape of memory, the unhurried attention to ordinary life is the soul of this mesmerizing series of linked poems. "For life is a briefness we carry calmly on an average day."

[David Curry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Themes of loss, displacement, evanescence and ephemerality dominate the poetry in Jesus Castlllo’s Remains and can become compulsive, repetitive and tiring. The language too often seems simultaneously both forced and arbitrary. Yet an original, authentic voice keeps coming through. Every time I was tempted to give up on the book, Castillo would suddenly startle me with a compelling image, as with this: “… Cats staring out of street-side windows / then crawling out of sight with indifferent grace.” Hard on the heels of that comes this: “ … An aged woman / grown hard but with a kernel of fragility that she keeps / secret …”

Watch, and listen to, this:

“Inside the dead tree, the children built a fire
and tried to find the birthplace of each flame. Their hearts
drifted like ghosts. The flames rose from the small
pit of coal and dry newspaper, reached a peak and
vanished. The result was a kind of trance. The spastic
flashes colored the walls of the trunk and lent
the children’s skins an ancient glow. The children smiled
as if this proved they still knew something. After a while
any constant noise can substitute for silence. When the flames
dimmed and the crackle subsided, there was the forest’s
sighs and creaks.”

Castillo can be befuddling, but he is clearly a poet to keep an eye on. I should say that some of my reservations might very well have more to do with my own predilections and limitations than with Castillo’s work.

The book has been handsomely produced by McSweeney’s with some of the most securely sewn binding signatures I’ve ever seen and stunning cover art and frontispiece by Hannah E. Morris.

[Un Perogrullo]

Remains is an exceptional piece, not only because of its careful artistry, but because of its scope. It's an ambitious, long serial poem whose vision ranges from the current times to the timeless, the mundane to the sacred, the dogmatic to the open questions. It erases all type of boundaries. Beyond being half-American and half-Mexican, Jesús Castillo names and thinks life outside any location, national idiosyncrasy or identity.

Through a series of poetic threads, and multiple voices, Castillo executes the sometimes forgotten tradition of combining the song with the idea, the lyricism with the reflection. Singing and thinking become here part of an undivided aesthetic purpose.

Not just a celebration of the self nor an exploration of language, Remains recalls the ancient ambition for truth and beauty. His song is not new, but unlike most of his contemporaries, Castillo carries the torch of the epic tradition, and in his hands the music has changed but not the aim.

[Josh Hornbeck · Rating 4 out of 5]

FIRST THOUGHTS:
I found the poetry in this collection really compelling, each verse filled with imagery that took me by surprise, that stunned and moved me. I will certainly be returning to this collection in the future to revisit poems that really struck me the first time, or to take a second look at one that I didn’t connect with on a first reading. These are dense works - in the best possible way - so I know that many of these poems will benefit from multiple readings over the years. Nice collection.

[Tareq Abuissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading the first few pages, I had to borrow this poetry collection from my girlfriend to finish on my own time.

Capricious free-verse paragraphs of 10-12 lines each. Working through the pages, I was delighted by moments of unexpected or surreal resonance. The subject matter feels very contemporary -- at points the poet riffs so much on one phrase it's almost like rap, at other points it feels like an abstract diary.

[Brandon Amico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Through a persistent, generous eye and voice, Jesús Castillo pulls together an exciting and touching lyric of modern life. The passages are self-contained but explode with wit and color. The regularly-spaced stanzas that make up Remains become windows on a train, a clear and stunning image that is replaced with yet another, and another, each time we blink.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

i suppose this review is only for the second half bc i can’t even remember when i started this. i am not the most critical or practiced poetry reader. these didn’t make me feel a ton, but i really liked that castillo didn’t rely on a huge, complicated vocab, just unexpected usage.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This volume grew on me steadily until, by the end, I was a bit in awe of its beauty. At the start I found myself wavering in my focus, as it is somewhat dense as far as content is concerned, but it is built upon small vignettes that are vibrant and beautiful when read carefully, but without an eye on building a narrative. That said, a kind of consistency in subject matter and imagery laces all the poems together and it finishes as a kind of quiet, mundane celebration of, and meditation on life. I'll be reading this collection again.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems that beg to be read out loud. Lyrical, dense, descriptive.