Beast Meridian

by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

Beast Meridian narrates the first- generation Mexican American girl, tracking the experiences of cultural displacement, the inheritance of generational trauma, sexist and racist violence, sexual assault, economic struggle, and institutional racism and sexism that disproportionately punishes brown girls in crisis. Narrated by a speaker in mourning marked as an at-risk juvenile, psychologically troubled, an offender, expelled and sent to alternative school for adolescents with behavioral issues, and eventually, a psychiatric hospital, she survives the school to prison pipeline, the immigrant working class condition, grueling low- pay service jobs, conservative classism against Latinos in Texas, queerness, assimilation, and life wrapped up in frivolous citations, fines, and penalties. The traumatic catalyst for the long line of trouble begins with the death of a beloved young grandmother from preventable cervical cancer—another violence of systemic racism and sexism that prevents regular reproductive and sexual health care to poor immigrant communities—and the subsequent deaths of other immigrant family members who are mourned in the dissociative states amidst the depressive trauma that opens the book. The dissociative states that mark the middle—a surreal kind of shadowland where the narrator encounters her animal self and ancestors imagined as animals faces brutal surreal challenges on the way back to life beyond trauma—is a kind of mictlan, reimagined as a state of constant mourning that challenges American notions of "healing" from trauma, and rather acknowledges sadness, mourning, and memory as a necessary state of constant awareness to forge a "way back" toward a broader healing of earth, time, body, history.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Latinx, Gay, Memoir, Feminism, Queer

100 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2017

About the author

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the essay collection Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders (Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Dutton Books and Penguin Random House, 2024) and the poetry collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017). She is a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Harper’s Bazaar, Oxford American, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and holds a doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she lives with her son and a loyal dog. Find her on Twitter @Vanessid.

Reviews

[Ken]

Through the lens of women, of Central America, of refugees and immigrants, of violence, of nature, of healing, of blood and pain, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal gives us some at times raw and at times transcendent poems.

The book is 8 x 10 inches for a reason, as she favors all manner of shapes and spacings and symbols, using white page like open country (that could close on you at any minute) to infuse greater meaning into her work. A typically-sized 6x9 poetry book, then, would not do.

Example poem:


A Field of Onions: Brown Study

dedicated to the immigrants buried in mass graves in and near Falfurrias, Texas

1. I walk through a bald field blooming violet onions. I will know I am absolved when there is no more dirt underfoot, when I have flipped the earth and the river runs above us, a glassed belldark sound.
2. To find: liver, lung, womb. A lens cut from vulture eye. This is what it is to miss a thing.
3. At the McDonald’s, a man in a parked car will talk himself awake. This is another kind of hunger.
4. A prayer for the king: forty pears, all bloomed from young throats. Long life, a sea of rice, a thicket of braids.
5. Problem: Four boats arranged in a cross drift away from each other in opposing directions. What theory states that, all conditions remaining equal, they can reach each other again on the other side of a perfect globe?
6. To understand a map is to shrink the world; to plan; to color.
7. Can you smell the vinegar blood in the babes, stardappled. The survivors ride the beast train toward the North, over those rolled off onto the tracks. See their legs, scattered.
8. Olga in Minnesota: to be with her mother amidst rags of spring snow. For now, she is curled in the glovebox of a Chevrolet Cavalier.
9. Bless you, all that meat and milk, threaded. Pass, you fairer animal. Not you. I have seen the door in the water.
10. Solution: Magical thinking.
12. To panic is to feel all your wildness at once.
13. A flock of geese felled to the open plain, the lush grass confounds even the birds for passable angles.
14. We the holy, are never really still. Agitation pulls even at hanging planets.
15. Four sirens twist their voices—four dead in the desert borderlands.
16. In this dream, I am on a plane. I wake up to the pilot smiling down on me. No one flies the plane. Or, I am flying the plane.
17. The threads fly loose on each body, some sown to others, some not. But let’s not take this metaphor too far; we are better than the obvious.
18. A hero is a plane of being.
19. I think of a girl at space camp, perched above a better telescope than she has in her room. Tonight, she figures space as a map of horses. Blur, focus. Blur and focus. Tonight, the clouds will pull apart for her. Tonight, we will all dream of horses.
20. My ancestor says: Later, when I arrive at your house, I will hang a crown of flowers at your door. And yours. And yours.
21. And: Sometimes I choose to come through your television. In sleep, you will mistake me for dripping water. You will think you heard your father. We visit each other in these ways.
22. Plan B. From the moon, the earth is a crown of dark marble.
23. There are varying kinds of tragedy that produce the same outcome: paperwork.
24. And even if we did save the trees, or the whales, the hunger would still be so great the people who need saving would still need saving.
25. The heads of violet onions, rooted child fingers, blue-leafed lips. An orchard, a mass grave.
26. I give you my coat and scarf in offering. I have no choice, I was born to saints in pilgrimage.
27. Paper-purple skin. Grounded bodies. The border. A field of onions.
27. Thesis: I swallow a bee for each ill deed done. I am a hive walking. I strain to hear you over the regret.

[André Habet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fucking stunning collection that really broke open language to me in a new way. Seriously. Get your eyes and heart on this asap

[Tom · Rating 1 out of 5]

Could not recommend, not even as a coaster.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh man, if I could give this book 6 out of 5 stars, I would. Possibly the best book of poetry I've read this year. So exultant and unbridled in its lyricism. So raw and yet so controlled. The haunting and strikingly gorgeous images, the daring challenge to form, the hybrid romp through language and myth and history, the fuck you to hegemony, the absolute mastery of scene and story. This book should be assigned reading in every class.

[Meghan Lamb · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful living archive (that beautifully pays homage to the unlived and unliveable, to its ghosts and absences)

[Zoë · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genius. Villarreal plays with form in such interesting ways, straddling the meridian of language and relationships. the second half being an abstraction of the first is so well done, in the hands of a lesser poet it could have been jarring, but the personal mythology is executed so beautifully that the flow stays uninterrupted. starts strong and ends stronger. love the addition of photographs and location details.

raw but with excellent restraint, violence that is usually kept silent demands space in the size of this book

[Vincenzo Bilof · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite poetry collections. Villarreal is a linguistic sorceress, and though I could never understand her pain or her struggle, I appreciate that she has the gift to share it all with us. A masterpiece.

[Phil Overeem · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most consistently amazing collection I’ve read from a young poet in years! WOW.

[Miguel Vega · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely a more challenging book of poetry, not in the language, but the container the poems take. But boy when you get it, you get it.

[Kiley Torres · Rating 5 out of 5]

this goes so, incredibly, wickedly, beautifully, grotesquely, surreally, and intellectually hard asf

This author is my hero

[Laura]

I am sure this was brilliant I just don't know how to read poetry

[Janel D. Brubaker · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my biggest goals for 2021 is to read as much poetry as I can possibly stand. I'd like to read other books too (there are several on my to-be-read list that I'd like to dive into), but what I feel most compelled towards right now is poetry. In my own work and in my reading practice, poetry is where I want to invest most. As such, I've been reading one book of poetry every single week.

This last week, the book I read was this one. It's part of my reading list for my M.F.A. I'm in my last semester and that means I'm working on my creative thesis. That means I'm reading books that my mentor believes will aid me in revising, editing, and polishing my creative thesis, which is a collection of my own poetry documenting, discussing, dissecting, and processing my experiences with trauma. Which means a lot of the poetry books I'll be reading over the next several months will also be books that document and discuss trauma.

However, I'm not sure any of the books I read from this point forward will accomplish this in quite the same fashion as this phenomenal, surprising, breathtaking book. Beast Meridian is written in the voices of many Indigenous Mexican identities and their displacement among white colonialism. It's a book about family, about place, about connection and disconnection from the earth, about one (or many) Indigenous experiences of erasure, of silencing, and of violence. It is one of the most raw and honest books about grief and loss I have ever read.

One of the most astonishing things about this book is the deeply incantatory and reverent ways in which the speaker writes of her and her family's loss. Imagery that both pulled me into the story and also reminded me of my culpability - as a white woman - in their suffering. Imagery that is both visceral and ethereal, ecological and mythological. Villarreal doesn't just weave these images into her poetry, she structures each poem around them. It's as if the poems are a manifestation of the images, a photograph of words, a painting of memories, come to life through ink on parchment. It's a way of utilizing imagery that I have never encountered before.

The book is divided into three sections, each one built around a collection of different themes. And while I loved each section, I was most captivated and entranced by the last: The Way Back. In this section, the poems abandon their primary poetic form and take the shape of prosaic fragments. In these fragments, it's as though the speakers from all of the other poems are welded together and become a character of mythology: a single woman who is Othered to the point of being ostracized and outcast; a woman who find solace and acceptance in the earth, the land her ancestors lived in. In this isolation, this Otheredness, this return to the history that flows through her body, the speaker shapeshifts. She accepts the earth's embrace and begins to become one with it, becoming a beast of earth. It's an act of rebellion and of liberation because the speaker is refusing to assimilate to the expectations of white colonialism.

This section stands out to me the most because it is a kind of mythological reclaiming of generational identity. The rest of the book acknowledges and describes the generational trauma the speakers carry due to white colonialism, but it's this section that really reckons with the spiritual, physical, emotional, and generational trauma that is so often erased and ignored by white interpretations of Indigenous experience. These fragments of prose that span a total of ten pages take all of the grief written about in the two previous sections and uses them to forge an understanding of identity that is at once independent and communal. It feels like an incantation of rebirth, but not in the sense of something being made new; rather it feels like an incantation of return, a rebirth into what once was.

The very last poem of this section (and of the whole book) culminates in a statement of acceptance, a declaration of identity: "...after fate will have made an opus / of every brutal abandoning / I will succumb to the hunter in the profound: / a gallant leap into a copse of pines, the beast / born split, each arrow pierces two beings: / in wound, the animal turns constellation; / the feminine, obscene." This is where grief leads the speaker. This is where grief blends with history. This is where history reclaims its breath in the body of an Indigenous woman who, from the previous ten poems, has rebecome a daughter (and now mother) of earth. And while this book emanates an atmosphere of reclamation, it also doesn't minimize or shy away from the generations of trauma that fill her (their) body (bodies).

Read this book. I found myself gasping out loud at multiple points, not merely for the beauty of the writing, but also from the raw honesty that doesn't hold back from accusation. It's a phenomenal piece of work, a truly breathtaking compilation of stories. If you read it, you will be a different person by the end of the book.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I might appreciate most in Villarreal's book is the negotiation between being of and being. Meaning, the poems acknowledge all the ways Villarreal identifies with or among the Latinx community or the queer community; they mark a feminism that is about womanhood and being a woman of color. There is so much about context in the poems. What it means to be from this place. To have been a woman in this place. To have experienced this racism of this place.

It reminds me a lot of Anastacias-Renée's book (v.), where the poems are both in the midst of the various identities intersecting and the challenge to adequately represent that complication when the various identities intersect. In Anastacia-Renée's book, there is a conspicuous device that I read as a "context builder." They mark experiences that are unfortunately not surprising to hear of, but which need to be said, as they are part of her book's reality.

Villarreal is of these communities. And she's the poet Villarreal, who lived among this context, and had her own life that inflects on that context. That's what I mean by "being of" versus "being." I don't think Villarreal has a poetic device that, in a sense, compartmentalizes poem from context. Instead, I would say her poems are often expressing the struggle when an individual has to contend with the challenges that come with life, while also having to contend with the cultural antagonisms of racism or sexism. Like, on one hand, Beast Meridian could be read as a bildungsroman, with the poet explaining to the reader how she ended up where she is. Then drag that bildungsroman through the siltiest silt, feel that struggle, add that struggle to what is already there.

And I don't just say that as a kind of concept. Like the concept of context versus individuality, and how that would play out with identity poetics. The poems are attached to a weight, the weight drags the poems into the reader's body, the experience of reading the poems is not an intellectual activity, though, of course, the reader is led to think of these dynamics. That, for me, is the amplification I feel in Beast Meridian. A series of complications the poet relates to the reader via impression and felt experience, with both saturating the language.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beast Meridian is a rich poetic offering from a highly talented Latinx writer, Vanessa Angelica Villareal.

A massive inspiration drawn from this collection lies in the poem Malinche, named after the indigenous woman said to have served as an interpreter, liaison, traitor, and ultimately the mother of all Mexicans. The poem is a linguistic, conceptual, and structural labyrinth. In the center is a blank square. Surrounding this blankness are the revelatory interpretations of Malinche’s role in the birthing of Mexico and her life via a complex square of texts that yields no easy way to read it. The order and possibilities of interpreting this work are numerous, as should be the way we view Malinche’s complexity. Here, Villarreal births, conceives, raises, and transmutes Malinche into all her complex possibilities, and through this does the same for Mexican-American culture and its women. One possible order of words reads, “I hunt my hunter the wilderness in myself I open my illness to the kingdom I am cleaved by the old and new world I entomb elders in the valley and grow mild flowers of their teeth I birth a betrayed nation…cause I make my nation my victim…I am she who betrays blood for a little bit of kingdom” (15). In this iteration, we see the complexity and can begin to empathize with Malinche’s position as a woman, mother, person, and symbol.

The rest of the poems are no less creative, jarring, emotionally trying, and linguistically complex. The mixture of Spanish, English, and Spanglish paint the scenes of these poems with the geographical movement, social integration, and cultural alienation that spawned them.

I highly recommend this collection of poems as they are as informative, emotionally, and linguistically complex as possible. I look forward to more of her work.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly rare re-read for me. This book is phenomenal. One of the few books where I find that every single format and structural choice has a tangible and direct relation to the subject and content of the poems therein. On top of that, Villarreal doesn't settle into any form of predictability: strong beginnings, complicated middle-stanzas, and heartwrenching final lines all have their unique prominence in this collection.

I hope to find ways to teach it in the future, and can't wait to introduce new writers and readers to Villarreal.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every single poem has at least one moment that strikes me so personally with an unshared experience that feels shared that I pause or put the book down. I'm on my third time through. It's one of those first books that marks the time it's entering with something that shows us poetry is always changing, that there are always new poets who love poetry in a singular way none of the rest of us ever have before.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Villarreal's poems are able to evoke both the mythic and the contemporary. The language and images in this poems are gorgeous. This is the rare collection where I loved almost every poem. While this is only my first reading, I do suspect that my appreciation for these poems will grow multiple readings.

[Tiffany Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An impressive and masterful work that interweaves identity, race, immigration, research and emotion into a beautiful story of survival. A book that testifies of the resilience of immigrants and their families in this country that cherishes roots while speaking to the realities that many immigrants face. My words can’t adequately describe this beautiful collection of poems. Wow!

[Dora Prieto · Rating 5 out of 5]

so stunning... so much in these pages, so much experimentation and beautiful use of language. It got to me on all levels, conceptual, emotional, intellectual, embodied. Ay ay ay, ya qué...
Day 1 of the Sealey Challenge

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read my review here: https://www.usi.edu/sir/reviews/the-m...

[Jessica]

“Thesis: I swallow a bee for each ill deed done. I am a hive walking. I strain to hear you over / the regret.”

—from poem “A Field if Onions: Brown Study.”

[Nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

striking

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Absolute TRASH!! Do not buy!!

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really lovely and powerful collection of poems. Villarreal plays with form in interesting ways to explore her experience and the experiences of ancestors whose stories live on despite attempts to erase them. It uses imagery and diction of nature, the body, constellations, myth, and history to navigate discussions and interrogations of family, assimilation, colonialism, violence, illness, grief, and identity in a beautiful and intense way.

[Connie · Rating 5 out of 5]

[S]tunning . . . I love it from opening with honoring ancestors to ending on a constellation.

from “Submerging Myself In Poetry For The Sealey Challenge” via BOOK RIOT: https://bookriot.com/submerging-mysel...

[Michael Reyes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such brilliant forms and wonderful constellation of lexicons and images! Beast Meridian documents the borderlands, erasures and colonialisms, generational traumas and resiliences with such pain, homage, and strangeness. I can't wait to see what's next for V.A.V. -- a powerhouse in Latinx poetry.

[Mills College Library]

811.6 V722b 2017