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MyOTHER TONGUE
Poetry
88 pages, Paperback
Published June 1, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
December 21, 2017
A really good collection of poetry, & very technically proficient. Most prominent in my mind are the lingering mother motifs, dealt out in personal and mythic terms alike. A real clarity to the work, and the speaker(s?) seem to be saying exactly what they want to without much melodrama/ambiguous language/affected voice. Sort of reminds me of Karen Solie some.
Wasn't a fan of the front end of the book, and certainly underwhelmed by "Projection," which I secretly hoped would be rescued by a more exciting end of book explanation, but turned out to be exactly what it sounded and read like; when the literary dabbles in edgier and more experimental territory the literary should take care not to get shown up, distracted, or muddied by whatever project it is that it's engaging with; if the poem could achieve the same affect as the (performance, video, questionnaire, intervention, whatever) act it's referencing we ought to question if the act is interesting enough to reference in the first place, and if it can't relay or punctuate or build onto or transform that other referenced piece's effect then maybe it should just steer clear altogether? Reads like a class assignment, failing to fulfill spectral goals that it references.
My apologies for the big nitpick paragraph! I only dedicate time to that idea because there's little else to be so picky about (short the opening I couldn't engage with for one reason or the other).
I'll share my favourite passage here:
"...and she hands the phone to my mother, and my mother, who is not the poem, has trouble understanding me. So I write this poem, which understands me perfectly and never needs the nurse's station and never worries about unintelligible accents or speaking loudly enough or the trouble with dying, which can be understood as a loss of language."
Wasn't a fan of the front end of the book, and certainly underwhelmed by "Projection," which I secretly hoped would be rescued by a more exciting end of book explanation, but turned out to be exactly what it sounded and read like; when the literary dabbles in edgier and more experimental territory the literary should take care not to get shown up, distracted, or muddied by whatever project it is that it's engaging with; if the poem could achieve the same affect as the (performance, video, questionnaire, intervention, whatever) act it's referencing we ought to question if the act is interesting enough to reference in the first place, and if it can't relay or punctuate or build onto or transform that other referenced piece's effect then maybe it should just steer clear altogether? Reads like a class assignment, failing to fulfill spectral goals that it references.
My apologies for the big nitpick paragraph! I only dedicate time to that idea because there's little else to be so picky about (short the opening I couldn't engage with for one reason or the other).
I'll share my favourite passage here:
"...and she hands the phone to my mother, and my mother, who is not the poem, has trouble understanding me. So I write this poem, which understands me perfectly and never needs the nurse's station and never worries about unintelligible accents or speaking loudly enough or the trouble with dying, which can be understood as a loss of language."
May 2, 2018
"This land, angular and strange--we are
citizens--
--our ascension--as Icarus
and then our
descent--the erased trail
of migrants" (6)
"Who // comes in singing / with your tray, and // lovingly washes your underwear? Who / has given me an accent and // upper-body / strength?"
The poems often find themselves between and among the speaker's mother, the speaker, and her daughter, between speaking for herself and to the multitudes of women named in "Dear Maria," between through vivid weaves of the mythic, metapoetic, and reproductive (broadly defined) labors. Many contain powerful elegiac moments, mourning what the speaker knows is lost and what the speaker knows they don’t know that is lost (“the erased trail / of migrants”). "My Body's Production" impugns the capitalism that makes work so relentless that it deforms bodies through images of personal loss: "My body now weaves / a funeral shroud // for mother / her wooden gears / ground down." There’s also wit, desire, and defiance in the poems. They’re full and precise, brilliantly so. Looking forward to reading more Alcalá, rereading this w/a friend.
citizens--
--our ascension--as Icarus
and then our
descent--the erased trail
of migrants" (6)
"Who // comes in singing / with your tray, and // lovingly washes your underwear? Who / has given me an accent and // upper-body / strength?"
The poems often find themselves between and among the speaker's mother, the speaker, and her daughter, between speaking for herself and to the multitudes of women named in "Dear Maria," between through vivid weaves of the mythic, metapoetic, and reproductive (broadly defined) labors. Many contain powerful elegiac moments, mourning what the speaker knows is lost and what the speaker knows they don’t know that is lost (“the erased trail / of migrants”). "My Body's Production" impugns the capitalism that makes work so relentless that it deforms bodies through images of personal loss: "My body now weaves / a funeral shroud // for mother / her wooden gears / ground down." There’s also wit, desire, and defiance in the poems. They’re full and precise, brilliantly so. Looking forward to reading more Alcalá, rereading this w/a friend.
February 11, 2022
Alcalá's engagement with the archive as a problematic but important space is especially fascinating to me. In particular, what is, in fact, captured by an archive, and what isn't? How many daily, personal, and intimate actions feel worthy of archival capture, but will remain singular and individual? And, most interesting to me, the running irony that by virtue of her poems, those actions now are archived. The book is such a careful and fascinating engagement with materials!
February 1, 2018
Rating: Low 4
The last section is really good. The second section has some gems as well. The other two sections are just so-so.
Favorites:
"Natural Disaster: A Dream"
"Paramour" - the English language
"Training"
Money
as autobiography.
As fairytale
mirror.
- "The 11th Day of Occupy Wall Street"
Voices, like ghosts,
always win. They can
walk through walls
or move furniture.
- "Voice: An Essay"
The last section is really good. The second section has some gems as well. The other two sections are just so-so.
Favorites:
"Natural Disaster: A Dream"
"Paramour" - the English language
"Training"
Money
as autobiography.
As fairytale
mirror.
- "The 11th Day of Occupy Wall Street"
Voices, like ghosts,
always win. They can
walk through walls
or move furniture.
- "Voice: An Essay"
November 14, 2018
Amazing haunting, Alcalá unpacks family and language and in many ways the immigrant family experience. A gorgeous collection, highly recommended
Read
April 11, 2021“If leaving / isn’t my legacy / what is— “
dnf
August 9, 2021DNF, it’s just not for me.
March 26, 2023
Best one yet of Rosa
April 21, 2023
PEDAGOGY: A DREAM (section 4, p75)
...
exceed her limits, though her age hung
from her
armpits.
...
...
exceed her limits, though her age hung
from her
armpits.
...
March 7, 2024
Been thinking about this book for days. Collections with impact are few and far between. This is one of them.
March 25, 2024
In her poetry book MyOTHER TONGUE, Rosa Alcalá beautifully explores themes of femininity and language. As a bilingual poet and translator from New Jersey, she works in both English and Spanish. Alcalá bridges the personal and the political, speaking about the cyclicality of nature from the death of her mother to the birth of her daughter.
The title of her book elicits a multiplicity of meanings, as depicted on the cover of the book. Within MyOTHER TONGUE, there is a myriad of connotations nested into the title: HER TONGUE (depicting a feminine other), MOTHER TONGUE (connoting one’s native language), MY TONGUE (a declaration of belonging, possession, and ownership), and OTHER TONGUE (creating a distinction between the self and the other). All of these themes are explored in the collection, painting a beautiful portrait of the intersectionality of what it means to be bilingual and female in American society.
One of the major ways that she does this is through fragmentation. The collection itself is fragmented into four sections, and certain individual poems are fragmented on the page with a plethora of line breaks and caesuras (particularly the poems in the first and third sections). Even in theme, Alcalá fragments the body into different parts, discussing blood, lips, breasts, and hair in disjointed parts. In her poem “Pedagogy: A Dream,” she mentions she can “put myself together / then pull myself apart,” in a Frankensteinian assemblage and dismemberment, speaking to how society idealizes and idolizes a body that is “skinner and whiter and more American.” There are two major connotations behind the presence of physical and thematic fragmentation; first, the objectification and dismemberment of the female body in a male-centric society. And second, the fragmentation of identity considering Alcalá’s dual cultural and linguistic background.
The female body is heavily featured throughout the collection. One of the major recurrences is the presence of blood, which carries a multiplicity of meanings. Blood refers to someone’s lineage and identity, as it does in the poem “The 11th Day of Occupy Wall Street,” as it depicts blood as “a name / and a place of origin.” But it also carries a connotation of a loss of innocence, as depicted in the lines “three lovely dancers / rehearsed my once youthful gait / through blood" in the poem “Purity and Danger: A Performance.” Blood represents a loss of innocence either by the presence of violence coming from drawing blood or by entering womanhood with the start of a menstrual cycle.
In this way, this collection of poetry represents the act of crossing from one place to another. These places can be physical, from one location to another, as seen in the imagery of descending stairs in the opening poem “The Story to be Written.” These places can be linguistic, from Spanish to English or vice versa, as seen in the poem “Dear Maria” which intersperses phrases like “Querida María” and other Spanish nicknames throughout its base English. These places can be stages of life, from girlhood to womanhood as seen in “Heritage Speaker.” Or, finally, these places can be metaphorical, from innocence to experience as seen throughout the whole collection but particularly in “Purity and Danger: A Performance,” as discussed before. Alcalá stands in the liminal space between all of these boundaries, blurring each of the extremities into an intermediary space.
Given her obsession with boundary-crossing, her language is infused with a nomadic essence, employing imagery that ranges from the concept of being rootless to the theme of wandering errantry. This includes references such as the journey of Noah's ark and evoking the spirit of gypsies, encapsulating a distinctly feminine nomadic quality. This theme of liminality culminates in the final two poems of the collection, which focus on ghostly appearances, a figure stuck in the liminal space between dead and alive. The poem “Voice: An Essay” concludes with the statement, “Voices, like ghosts, / always win. They can / walk through walls / or move furniture.” By likening voices to ghosts, Alcalá draws upon the idea that voices, much like spirits, persist beyond physical barriers and possess a certain ethereal quality. Voices and language thus transcend the boundaries of the tangible in ways that connect seemingly distinct domains.
In MyOTHER TONGUE, Rosa Alcalá's poetic exploration of femininity, language, and cultural liminality culminates in a profound acknowledgment of the enduring power of language to transcend borders and generations.
The title of her book elicits a multiplicity of meanings, as depicted on the cover of the book. Within MyOTHER TONGUE, there is a myriad of connotations nested into the title: HER TONGUE (depicting a feminine other), MOTHER TONGUE (connoting one’s native language), MY TONGUE (a declaration of belonging, possession, and ownership), and OTHER TONGUE (creating a distinction between the self and the other). All of these themes are explored in the collection, painting a beautiful portrait of the intersectionality of what it means to be bilingual and female in American society.
One of the major ways that she does this is through fragmentation. The collection itself is fragmented into four sections, and certain individual poems are fragmented on the page with a plethora of line breaks and caesuras (particularly the poems in the first and third sections). Even in theme, Alcalá fragments the body into different parts, discussing blood, lips, breasts, and hair in disjointed parts. In her poem “Pedagogy: A Dream,” she mentions she can “put myself together / then pull myself apart,” in a Frankensteinian assemblage and dismemberment, speaking to how society idealizes and idolizes a body that is “skinner and whiter and more American.” There are two major connotations behind the presence of physical and thematic fragmentation; first, the objectification and dismemberment of the female body in a male-centric society. And second, the fragmentation of identity considering Alcalá’s dual cultural and linguistic background.
The female body is heavily featured throughout the collection. One of the major recurrences is the presence of blood, which carries a multiplicity of meanings. Blood refers to someone’s lineage and identity, as it does in the poem “The 11th Day of Occupy Wall Street,” as it depicts blood as “a name / and a place of origin.” But it also carries a connotation of a loss of innocence, as depicted in the lines “three lovely dancers / rehearsed my once youthful gait / through blood" in the poem “Purity and Danger: A Performance.” Blood represents a loss of innocence either by the presence of violence coming from drawing blood or by entering womanhood with the start of a menstrual cycle.
In this way, this collection of poetry represents the act of crossing from one place to another. These places can be physical, from one location to another, as seen in the imagery of descending stairs in the opening poem “The Story to be Written.” These places can be linguistic, from Spanish to English or vice versa, as seen in the poem “Dear Maria” which intersperses phrases like “Querida María” and other Spanish nicknames throughout its base English. These places can be stages of life, from girlhood to womanhood as seen in “Heritage Speaker.” Or, finally, these places can be metaphorical, from innocence to experience as seen throughout the whole collection but particularly in “Purity and Danger: A Performance,” as discussed before. Alcalá stands in the liminal space between all of these boundaries, blurring each of the extremities into an intermediary space.
Given her obsession with boundary-crossing, her language is infused with a nomadic essence, employing imagery that ranges from the concept of being rootless to the theme of wandering errantry. This includes references such as the journey of Noah's ark and evoking the spirit of gypsies, encapsulating a distinctly feminine nomadic quality. This theme of liminality culminates in the final two poems of the collection, which focus on ghostly appearances, a figure stuck in the liminal space between dead and alive. The poem “Voice: An Essay” concludes with the statement, “Voices, like ghosts, / always win. They can / walk through walls / or move furniture.” By likening voices to ghosts, Alcalá draws upon the idea that voices, much like spirits, persist beyond physical barriers and possess a certain ethereal quality. Voices and language thus transcend the boundaries of the tangible in ways that connect seemingly distinct domains.
In MyOTHER TONGUE, Rosa Alcalá's poetic exploration of femininity, language, and cultural liminality culminates in a profound acknowledgment of the enduring power of language to transcend borders and generations.
November 19, 2022
Idk...I think it was just not my thing? Because I can't figure out what I actually disliked or anything I just...barely cared about and felt anything while reading, except for a few lines...
September 8, 2023
Unfortunately these poems didn't resonate with me. There are several long poems in the book and these felt very meandering and hard to follow.
from The Story to Be Written: "What likely / cost / incurred / as one / reads / or writes What is / to be read to or by / strangers that / isn't meant / to be sold / or bought?"
from The Story to Be Written: "What likely / cost / incurred / as one / reads / or writes What is / to be read to or by / strangers that / isn't meant / to be sold / or bought?"
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews