What do you think?
Rate this book
Museum of the Americas
Winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition, selected by Cornelius Eady—an exploration in verse of imperial appropriation and Mexican American cultural identity
The poems in J. Michael Martinez's third collection of poetry circle around how the perceived body comes to be allegorically coded with the transhistorical consequences of an imperial sociopolitical narrative. Engaging eighteenth-century Mexican casta paintings, the morbid lynching postcards of William Horne, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and Martinez's own family lineage, Museum of the Americas traces an aesthetic out of racialized scenes of corporeal excess. Hybrid in form, Museum of the Americas voices itself in theory, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Throughout, Martinez questions how "knowledge" of the body is organized through an observer's visual perception of that body. For Martinez, the corporeal always serves as a repository of the human situation, a nexus of culture. His work revives and repurposes the persecuted ethnic body from the biopolitical appropriations that render it a disposable aesthetic object.
The poems in J. Michael Martinez's third collection of poetry circle around how the perceived body comes to be allegorically coded with the transhistorical consequences of an imperial sociopolitical narrative. Engaging eighteenth-century Mexican casta paintings, the morbid lynching postcards of William Horne, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and Martinez's own family lineage, Museum of the Americas traces an aesthetic out of racialized scenes of corporeal excess. Hybrid in form, Museum of the Americas voices itself in theory, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Throughout, Martinez questions how "knowledge" of the body is organized through an observer's visual perception of that body. For Martinez, the corporeal always serves as a repository of the human situation, a nexus of culture. His work revives and repurposes the persecuted ethnic body from the biopolitical appropriations that render it a disposable aesthetic object.
112 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 2, 2018
13 people are currently reading
689 people want to read
About the author
J. Michael Martinez
13 books26 followersA Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, J. Michael Martinez received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his first book, "Heredities." "In the Garden of the Bridehouse," is available from the University of Arizona Press.
His third collection, "Museum of the Americas," was selected for the National Poetry Series by Cornelius Eady and is published by Penguin Press.
J. Michael's next work, “Tarta Americana” will be published by Penguin September of 2023. An Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University, he teaches in their MFA program and lives in San Jose.
About his work, Herrera wrote, it "breaks away from four decades of inquiry into cultural identity. Martinez's exhilarating descent into the unspoken—lit by metaphysical investigations, physiological charts, and meta-translations of Hernán Cortés's accounts of his conquests—gives voice to a dismembered continental body buried long ago. This body, though flayed and fractured, rises and sings."
His third collection, "Museum of the Americas," was selected for the National Poetry Series by Cornelius Eady and is published by Penguin Press.
J. Michael's next work, “Tarta Americana” will be published by Penguin September of 2023. An Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University, he teaches in their MFA program and lives in San Jose.
About his work, Herrera wrote, it "breaks away from four decades of inquiry into cultural identity. Martinez's exhilarating descent into the unspoken—lit by metaphysical investigations, physiological charts, and meta-translations of Hernán Cortés's accounts of his conquests—gives voice to a dismembered continental body buried long ago. This body, though flayed and fractured, rises and sings."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
July 4, 2018
This is a fascinating, layered collection of poetry that blurs genre in some really interesting ways. Martinez offers, as the title suggests, a museum of the Americas, and especially engages with Mexican migration and its effect on the body. Given the goings on of the world, this poetry is especially timely. Real standouts include Skin Maps, On the Naturalization of Alien Immigrants and Bodies of 3 Men Lying As They Fell After Being Executed (that one is stunning). But really, every poem or prose in this book offers something beautiful or haunting or illuminating. It is didactic but not in a heavy-handed way. Every thought, every word, every image is precisely rendered. Outstanding stuff here. Check it out.
April 13, 2022
Excerpt from the back cover, "Engaging beautiful and otherworldly Mexican casta paintings, morbid photographic postcards depicting the bodies of dead Mexicans, the strange journey of the wood and cork leg of General Santa Anna, and Martinez's own family lineage, Museum of the Americas gives accounts of migrant bodies caught beneath, and fashioned under, a radicalizing aesthetic gaze."
J. Michael Martinez has created a book that is quite unlike others that I have read and I was fascinated and haunted by the beauty of the poetry, which transported me to another time and place. Museum of the Americas is divided into four parts.
My favorite poems
From part I:
LORD, SPANGLISH ME
From part II:
"YNCINERACION DE CADAVERES EN BALBUENA" Postcard No. 35
"EXECUTING BANDITS IN MEXICO" A Postcard by Walter H. Horne
From part IV:
THE WAKE OF MARIA DE JESUS MARTINEZ
WHERE LOVE IS GROUND TO WHEAT for Maria Jesus Martinez
"You were laid among lilies,
the thin skin of the leaf, the interval, oak.
pews bowing beneath the weight.
If a stone were cast, your mouth
would be the well anchoring the water's
wish. And the word you would speak
in that incommensurable depth
could unlock space with a paper key.
Beside the casket, I collect my tears
before they fall so I may look at you,
so the white down of children may fill the empty beaches again,
so the bees may store the honey
where mercy prepares the map
of the forgiven within us.
We are too many skies,
we who cling to the visible,
& the bread of my routines,
now absent of you,
are abundant with you."
J. Michael Martinez has created a book that is quite unlike others that I have read and I was fascinated and haunted by the beauty of the poetry, which transported me to another time and place. Museum of the Americas is divided into four parts.
My favorite poems
From part I:
LORD, SPANGLISH ME
From part II:
"YNCINERACION DE CADAVERES EN BALBUENA" Postcard No. 35
"EXECUTING BANDITS IN MEXICO" A Postcard by Walter H. Horne
From part IV:
THE WAKE OF MARIA DE JESUS MARTINEZ
WHERE LOVE IS GROUND TO WHEAT for Maria Jesus Martinez
"You were laid among lilies,
the thin skin of the leaf, the interval, oak.
pews bowing beneath the weight.
If a stone were cast, your mouth
would be the well anchoring the water's
wish. And the word you would speak
in that incommensurable depth
could unlock space with a paper key.
Beside the casket, I collect my tears
before they fall so I may look at you,
so the white down of children may fill the empty beaches again,
so the bees may store the honey
where mercy prepares the map
of the forgiven within us.
We are too many skies,
we who cling to the visible,
& the bread of my routines,
now absent of you,
are abundant with you."
October 11, 2018
This poetry collection, while on the NBA longlist, did not make the shortlist. There are some excellent poems here, but a few that played with form were not as good to me. Many of the poems, however, give a strong message about the Mexican-American experience and the treatment of indigenous peoples in US history. 3.5⭐️
December 14, 2018
My review for the New York Times Book Review:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/bo...
During the European Renaissance, men of wealth and learning put together cabinets of curiosities. The contents consisted of objects whose categorical boundaries — in natural history, zoology, archaeology, ethnography, geology and so on — were not yet firmly established. Also known as wunderkammers, or “wonder-rooms,” these motley (and often scientifically and culturally dubious) collections served as the forerunners of what today we know as museums. Like museums, these compilations were hardly neutral. In the words of the art professor Francesca Fiorani, these costly and hard-to-acquire assemblages “conveyed symbolically the patron’s control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction.”
A great many of these cabinets contained holdings from the so-called New World, a place that the assemblers certainly had an interest in controlling. J. Michael Martinez’s third book, “Museum of the Americas,” won the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition, but its contents are unapologetically, excitingly hybrid, including prose, lineated verse, vintage postcards and black-and-white photographs. Thus, perhaps, this marvelous, argumentative and curiosity-provoking book is itself best thought of as a kind of corrective cabinet of wonders, one whose portraits and specimens complicate the dominant narratives of imperial conquest and control.
Like a curator overseeing a show, Martinez gives readers the sense that each item he incorporates has been carefully selected and thoughtfully juxtaposed with the ones around it. In an eight-page poem-essay called “Casta Paintings, an Erotics of Negation,” he guides the reader on a tour of this art form, which first appeared in the 1700s when mostly anonymous artists began depicting mixed-race individuals (“castas”) in Spain’s American colonies. With the authority of a docent, he comments on “the calligraphic script underscoring each panel,” noting that “this man designates the ‘Spanish,’ the woman is the ‘mulatta,’ and their child, carrying a basket of fruit, Nace torna atras, ‘a Return-backwards is Born,’” and observes how “Language & oil combine to boundary the body into ‘race.’” With the voice of a teacher, he points out how “In the 18th & into the 19th century, casta paintings were employed in New Spain to validate racial identity (‘whiteness’) in the legislation of land acquisition & in determining civil rights.” And with the critical eye of a keen comedian, he remarks, “The cast: kinky historiographical exhibitionism. Sextastic.”
Martinez’s approach is as brainy as it is entertaining, as political as it is personal. Throughout his heady exploration of the white gaze, colonial trauma and Mexican migration, the author audaciously asserts his well-read academic prowess, not afraid, for instance, to make the reader reach to understand an opening epigraph from Walter Benjamin about “the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape.” But so, too, is the book intensely embodied and intimate, its first section preceded with a photograph of Martinez’s parents, Jerry and Mary, at their wedding in 1974. In a later poem about this image titled “Family Photo — Slicing Their Wedding Cake,” he writes with obvious admiration of their youthful beauty and love:
They were the story time
& she, the elven smile
wearing a dove falling to frosting
& the curtains amber the parturient
father shape blurred inside
the foreground, auburn bright in snowed
shirt ruffles
Unlike many actual museums, “Museum of the Americas” wisely makes no pretense of being objective. Martinez subjects his chosen artifacts to pointed interrogations. In a series of pieces responding to the work of Walter H. Horne, a photographer for the Mexican War Photo Postcard Company during the era of the Mexican revolutionary general Francisco “Pancho” Villa, Martinez meditates on the white documentarian’s practice of mass-producing and selling graphic images of executions and war, effectively bringing about “a vast photographic immigration / of nameless Mexicans.” In “The Executioner’s Palisade,” he writes:
Stamped for address,
the paper carcass seals
word to image,
postscript to passage;
the Mexican — all virgin talisman
when mailed in a sepia ruin
whose only wound is postage —
the distance the body travels
to know another.
Martinez repeatedly calls the very impulse to display into question, from the touring around of the supposed head of the putative “criminal” Joaquin Murrieta to P. T. Barnum’s showing off of the prosthetic leg of General Santa Anna at his “American Museum in New York City on the corner of Broadway and Ann Street” to the document of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In doing so, he reveals that even though “display” ostensibly means “to make a prominent exhibition of something where it can be easily seen,” many such public presentations have problematically exploitive semi-hidden agendas. Even such commonly used labels as “explorer,” familiar to museum patrons from wall texts and audio guides, conceal countless unnamed pluralities and alternative points of view.
In a piece called “Of Maximo and Bartola, the Aztec Children,” illuminating one especially egregious erasure, Martinez writes of the specious explorer John Lloyd Stephens, whose “gratuitous travel narratives had established him, in the popular imagination of the mid-19th century, as having ‘discovered’ the ‘lost’ Mayan culture.” Stephens even went so far as to use the appropriative pseudonym Pedro Velasquez “to authenticate his fiction linguistically.”
Martinez’s power as a memoirist is considerable as well. In one of the book’s most unforgettable pieces, “Brown I See You, Brown I Don’t,” he blends his own experience of being identified racially by different people in different contexts, both threatening and non, with the psychological phenomenon of the Other-Race Effect, or ORE, the widely studied tendency of humans to most easily recognize the faces of the race with which they are most familiar.
The root word of museum originally meant “seat or shrine of the Muses”; its use in the sense of “a building to display objects” was first recorded in the 1680s. In this thrillingly genre-blurring book, Martinez evokes both senses of that etymology: The poetic delights suggest the presence of the Muses, and the items upon which he encourages the reader to focus produce a fresh and necessary gallery that rivets both the interest and the intellect.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/bo...
During the European Renaissance, men of wealth and learning put together cabinets of curiosities. The contents consisted of objects whose categorical boundaries — in natural history, zoology, archaeology, ethnography, geology and so on — were not yet firmly established. Also known as wunderkammers, or “wonder-rooms,” these motley (and often scientifically and culturally dubious) collections served as the forerunners of what today we know as museums. Like museums, these compilations were hardly neutral. In the words of the art professor Francesca Fiorani, these costly and hard-to-acquire assemblages “conveyed symbolically the patron’s control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction.”
A great many of these cabinets contained holdings from the so-called New World, a place that the assemblers certainly had an interest in controlling. J. Michael Martinez’s third book, “Museum of the Americas,” won the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition, but its contents are unapologetically, excitingly hybrid, including prose, lineated verse, vintage postcards and black-and-white photographs. Thus, perhaps, this marvelous, argumentative and curiosity-provoking book is itself best thought of as a kind of corrective cabinet of wonders, one whose portraits and specimens complicate the dominant narratives of imperial conquest and control.
Like a curator overseeing a show, Martinez gives readers the sense that each item he incorporates has been carefully selected and thoughtfully juxtaposed with the ones around it. In an eight-page poem-essay called “Casta Paintings, an Erotics of Negation,” he guides the reader on a tour of this art form, which first appeared in the 1700s when mostly anonymous artists began depicting mixed-race individuals (“castas”) in Spain’s American colonies. With the authority of a docent, he comments on “the calligraphic script underscoring each panel,” noting that “this man designates the ‘Spanish,’ the woman is the ‘mulatta,’ and their child, carrying a basket of fruit, Nace torna atras, ‘a Return-backwards is Born,’” and observes how “Language & oil combine to boundary the body into ‘race.’” With the voice of a teacher, he points out how “In the 18th & into the 19th century, casta paintings were employed in New Spain to validate racial identity (‘whiteness’) in the legislation of land acquisition & in determining civil rights.” And with the critical eye of a keen comedian, he remarks, “The cast: kinky historiographical exhibitionism. Sextastic.”
Martinez’s approach is as brainy as it is entertaining, as political as it is personal. Throughout his heady exploration of the white gaze, colonial trauma and Mexican migration, the author audaciously asserts his well-read academic prowess, not afraid, for instance, to make the reader reach to understand an opening epigraph from Walter Benjamin about “the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape.” But so, too, is the book intensely embodied and intimate, its first section preceded with a photograph of Martinez’s parents, Jerry and Mary, at their wedding in 1974. In a later poem about this image titled “Family Photo — Slicing Their Wedding Cake,” he writes with obvious admiration of their youthful beauty and love:
They were the story time
& she, the elven smile
wearing a dove falling to frosting
& the curtains amber the parturient
father shape blurred inside
the foreground, auburn bright in snowed
shirt ruffles
Unlike many actual museums, “Museum of the Americas” wisely makes no pretense of being objective. Martinez subjects his chosen artifacts to pointed interrogations. In a series of pieces responding to the work of Walter H. Horne, a photographer for the Mexican War Photo Postcard Company during the era of the Mexican revolutionary general Francisco “Pancho” Villa, Martinez meditates on the white documentarian’s practice of mass-producing and selling graphic images of executions and war, effectively bringing about “a vast photographic immigration / of nameless Mexicans.” In “The Executioner’s Palisade,” he writes:
Stamped for address,
the paper carcass seals
word to image,
postscript to passage;
the Mexican — all virgin talisman
when mailed in a sepia ruin
whose only wound is postage —
the distance the body travels
to know another.
Martinez repeatedly calls the very impulse to display into question, from the touring around of the supposed head of the putative “criminal” Joaquin Murrieta to P. T. Barnum’s showing off of the prosthetic leg of General Santa Anna at his “American Museum in New York City on the corner of Broadway and Ann Street” to the document of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In doing so, he reveals that even though “display” ostensibly means “to make a prominent exhibition of something where it can be easily seen,” many such public presentations have problematically exploitive semi-hidden agendas. Even such commonly used labels as “explorer,” familiar to museum patrons from wall texts and audio guides, conceal countless unnamed pluralities and alternative points of view.
In a piece called “Of Maximo and Bartola, the Aztec Children,” illuminating one especially egregious erasure, Martinez writes of the specious explorer John Lloyd Stephens, whose “gratuitous travel narratives had established him, in the popular imagination of the mid-19th century, as having ‘discovered’ the ‘lost’ Mayan culture.” Stephens even went so far as to use the appropriative pseudonym Pedro Velasquez “to authenticate his fiction linguistically.”
Martinez’s power as a memoirist is considerable as well. In one of the book’s most unforgettable pieces, “Brown I See You, Brown I Don’t,” he blends his own experience of being identified racially by different people in different contexts, both threatening and non, with the psychological phenomenon of the Other-Race Effect, or ORE, the widely studied tendency of humans to most easily recognize the faces of the race with which they are most familiar.
The root word of museum originally meant “seat or shrine of the Muses”; its use in the sense of “a building to display objects” was first recorded in the 1680s. In this thrillingly genre-blurring book, Martinez evokes both senses of that etymology: The poetic delights suggest the presence of the Muses, and the items upon which he encourages the reader to focus produce a fresh and necessary gallery that rivets both the interest and the intellect.
Read
June 29, 2021Yet another case of “maybe I would’ve liked this better if I could actually understand the writing”. Poetry is really hit or miss for me. I think the subject matter of this book is very important, but the meaning was lost because I couldn’t comprehend what the author was actually trying to say 75% of the time. I am simply not smart enough for books like this.
Read
January 13, 2020Fave: "Brown I See You, Brown I Don't"
September 14, 2024
Martinez leaves space for ancestors to speak and rejects the syntax of a colonizers language. This is a smart thrilling collection in conversation with the likes of Craig Santos Perez, Layli Long Soldier, and M. NourbeSe Phillip
February 15, 2019
As with Claudia Rankine's Citizen, I admire the ambition behind Museum of the Americas more than I like the poetry. Martinez is very very smart about the contours of Latinx experience in a frequently hostile hemisphere dominated by Anglo simplifications and (mis)representations. His sequence "Casta Paintings: an Erotics of Negation," "Brown I See You, Brown I Don't," and the title poem all address the contradictions of life on linguistic and "racial/ethnic/national" borders with clarity and insight. Problem for me is that the book feels a bit prose-y, with only a smattering of passages that move beyond the paraphraseable content. So the three stars is more a reflection of my aesthetic than the quality of the work. Glad I read it, probably won't revisit.
May 15, 2024
With a cover marked by the dichotomy of people observed under colonial rule, it’s no surprise that J. Michael Martinez’s Museum of the Americas delves deep into the long-lasting implications of colonialism in the Americas, before transitioning to interrogating the same rhetoric that has spread farther in time and location.
This imagined dichotomy of people painted onto canvas as a sort of catalogue of citizens, is known as a casta painting: this type of artwork is critical to the underlying themes of division, unity, and objectification that Martinez seeks to interrogate.
At first glance, a casta painting is arguably beautiful: a collection of images of family life in the newly defined Mexico, often times culturally blended, decorated ornately. A mother sewing. A father playing the guitar. A child looking up at their parents lovingly. These sublime paintings are however, as Martinez explicates in the principal section, a perverse tool meant to subjugate the people of the Americas.
It’s key to note that casta paintings are not simply decorations: they were commissioned by the Spanish elite during the 18th century as means to observe the exotic, far-off lands of the Americas, not limited to the flora and fauna, but the people of the New World themselves. It’s here that the numerous racial classifications developed, creating a host of new terms imposed on the people of the Americas.
Going further, Martinez goes to extreme lengths to depict the violent legacy of colonialism not only through intricately woven narratives in his poetry, but also through accompanying images of the slain, the deformed, and the marginalized: all in the context of voyeurism, classification, and spectacle.
At its core, Martinez’s work does what many authors fail to do when discussing the disturbing and complicated realities of colonialism: his depictions of residual colonial violence aren’t simply a spam of trauma. All too often, when we’re reading stories based around Latino life, we’re treated to an onslaught of uncomfortable imagery, focusing on the intense suffering of the people in these narratives, with little payoff. Sure, harrowing stories will always have a place in the culture, but they do little to offer readers with context to the violence. Instead, Martinez critically asks, and answers, “What is it like to live within this legacy?”.
Consequently, it is in this vein that Martinez’s storytelling excels the best: perhaps without even realizing it, readers fill the shoes of the voyeurs, witnessing a compilation of events through generations of systemic problems that have affected Latinos. The poems are anachronistic in this sense, with every piece feeling like a snapshot of someone’s life. The dedication to this format leans into the central motif of the casta all over again, even when readers are least expecting the concept to pop up again.
In one instance of this subversion of expectations, Martinez offers readers a depiction of a Mexican American family, with the father (who is also permanently marked by chemical irritant Agent Orange from the Vietnam War) playing baseball, the mother sitting idly in the park, and an infant shielded from the sun. This peek into the family’s life firmly positions readers from the outside looking in, with the subjects of the piece being perceived solely by description, since there’s no dialogue to accompany this domestic scene.
Making readers the voyeurs turns the narrative on its head: you can’t help but to not look away, entranced by Martinez’s intimate descriptions of interactions had with strangers and family members alike. It’s bad to pry, but Martinez artfully postures the readers as observers: a true banality of evil, underscored by the tonal moodiness and obscurity.
At the same time, the somber, dark mood of the collection doesn’t inspire dread in the readers—instead, it instills a sense of solemn respect. I couldn’t help but feel that the grainy haze of memories and experiences were meant to highlight the underlying insidious tendencies of colonialism, with the montage of scenes again harking back to the concept of the casta paintings.
In all, I believe that Martinez’s artful experimentation with form, tone, and mood give a much-needed breath of fresh air to the post-colonial discussion. Traumatic experiences are portrayed in such a way that doesn’t alienate readers, but instead leaves them with the sobering realization that they are, in fact, the spectators who participate in a system that Martinez illuminates as problematic and a violent runoff of the initial colonial era. The resulting world that Martinez explicates in Museum of the Americas entrenches readers in a labyrinth of internal and external discourse. His subversion of expectations along with his dedication to providing thematic images make for an intriguing read, which I think makes readers hungry for more answers to their questions about the legacies of colonialism.
This imagined dichotomy of people painted onto canvas as a sort of catalogue of citizens, is known as a casta painting: this type of artwork is critical to the underlying themes of division, unity, and objectification that Martinez seeks to interrogate.
At first glance, a casta painting is arguably beautiful: a collection of images of family life in the newly defined Mexico, often times culturally blended, decorated ornately. A mother sewing. A father playing the guitar. A child looking up at their parents lovingly. These sublime paintings are however, as Martinez explicates in the principal section, a perverse tool meant to subjugate the people of the Americas.
It’s key to note that casta paintings are not simply decorations: they were commissioned by the Spanish elite during the 18th century as means to observe the exotic, far-off lands of the Americas, not limited to the flora and fauna, but the people of the New World themselves. It’s here that the numerous racial classifications developed, creating a host of new terms imposed on the people of the Americas.
Going further, Martinez goes to extreme lengths to depict the violent legacy of colonialism not only through intricately woven narratives in his poetry, but also through accompanying images of the slain, the deformed, and the marginalized: all in the context of voyeurism, classification, and spectacle.
At its core, Martinez’s work does what many authors fail to do when discussing the disturbing and complicated realities of colonialism: his depictions of residual colonial violence aren’t simply a spam of trauma. All too often, when we’re reading stories based around Latino life, we’re treated to an onslaught of uncomfortable imagery, focusing on the intense suffering of the people in these narratives, with little payoff. Sure, harrowing stories will always have a place in the culture, but they do little to offer readers with context to the violence. Instead, Martinez critically asks, and answers, “What is it like to live within this legacy?”.
Consequently, it is in this vein that Martinez’s storytelling excels the best: perhaps without even realizing it, readers fill the shoes of the voyeurs, witnessing a compilation of events through generations of systemic problems that have affected Latinos. The poems are anachronistic in this sense, with every piece feeling like a snapshot of someone’s life. The dedication to this format leans into the central motif of the casta all over again, even when readers are least expecting the concept to pop up again.
In one instance of this subversion of expectations, Martinez offers readers a depiction of a Mexican American family, with the father (who is also permanently marked by chemical irritant Agent Orange from the Vietnam War) playing baseball, the mother sitting idly in the park, and an infant shielded from the sun. This peek into the family’s life firmly positions readers from the outside looking in, with the subjects of the piece being perceived solely by description, since there’s no dialogue to accompany this domestic scene.
Making readers the voyeurs turns the narrative on its head: you can’t help but to not look away, entranced by Martinez’s intimate descriptions of interactions had with strangers and family members alike. It’s bad to pry, but Martinez artfully postures the readers as observers: a true banality of evil, underscored by the tonal moodiness and obscurity.
At the same time, the somber, dark mood of the collection doesn’t inspire dread in the readers—instead, it instills a sense of solemn respect. I couldn’t help but feel that the grainy haze of memories and experiences were meant to highlight the underlying insidious tendencies of colonialism, with the montage of scenes again harking back to the concept of the casta paintings.
In all, I believe that Martinez’s artful experimentation with form, tone, and mood give a much-needed breath of fresh air to the post-colonial discussion. Traumatic experiences are portrayed in such a way that doesn’t alienate readers, but instead leaves them with the sobering realization that they are, in fact, the spectators who participate in a system that Martinez illuminates as problematic and a violent runoff of the initial colonial era. The resulting world that Martinez explicates in Museum of the Americas entrenches readers in a labyrinth of internal and external discourse. His subversion of expectations along with his dedication to providing thematic images make for an intriguing read, which I think makes readers hungry for more answers to their questions about the legacies of colonialism.
December 12, 2019
Museum of the Americas is a really admirable endeavor, because it aspires to be more than what books usually are. As Roxane Gay says in her blurb on the back cover, this collection “blurs genre in some really interesting ways … Given the goings on of the world, this poetry is especially timely.” Martínez is searching for something more than just poetry or prose here—a mix of art and instruction, the study of history with some music played behind it, ekphrastic investigations of the light and heavy elements that photographs carry within themselves.
Honestly, I am not always the biggest fan of Martínez’s poetry. He has “it,” but I think that he does himself a disservice by so often restricting poetic line length and playing with spacing on the page. At times, the brevity really gets me—“this pivot / point so carcass / carved” (“POTUS XLV”) and “The man’s arms are / amputated by luminance” (“Executing Bandits in Mexico”). Poems like “Instructions for Identifying ‘Illegal’ Immigrants” and “Lord, Spanglish Me” have their moments, but the line breaks sometimes seemed out of place and the unusual spacing became distracting. “One Grave for 63 Men after the Battle” and the closing (and heartbreaking eulogy) “Where Love is Ground to Wheat” are examples of the good things that come from Martínez stretching things out into longer lines.
What does really draw me to this book is how Martínez spices up didactic pieces. “If there is life, it is public domain” (“Triple Execution in Mexico”) draws a really interesting line from now to 100 years ago. The two parallel voices speaking in “Brown I see you, Brown I Don’t” make for an interesting dialogue. The series “Casta Paintings, an Erotics of Negation” and “Museum of the Americas” are telling historical tales of identity formation, but the poetic prose puts a spring in their steps. Sometimes the didactic does seem to take over—the untitled piece on p. 42 is like a conclusion at the end of an academic article, and the untitled piece on p. 16 seems like it could have done without the closing line, “The cast: kinky historiographical exhibitionism. Sextastic.” Sometimes it felt like he didn’t trust me to connect the dots on my own.
All that being said, I can't think of another book like this. Martínez is wrestling with heady concepts, and his hands extend into the outer reaches to teach us about the historical roots of contemporary prejudices, to remind us that the US-Mexico border has long been a site of physical and political violence. He also reminds us, by focusing on themes of family and love, that we can draw strength from one another instead of venom.
Honestly, I am not always the biggest fan of Martínez’s poetry. He has “it,” but I think that he does himself a disservice by so often restricting poetic line length and playing with spacing on the page. At times, the brevity really gets me—“this pivot / point so carcass / carved” (“POTUS XLV”) and “The man’s arms are / amputated by luminance” (“Executing Bandits in Mexico”). Poems like “Instructions for Identifying ‘Illegal’ Immigrants” and “Lord, Spanglish Me” have their moments, but the line breaks sometimes seemed out of place and the unusual spacing became distracting. “One Grave for 63 Men after the Battle” and the closing (and heartbreaking eulogy) “Where Love is Ground to Wheat” are examples of the good things that come from Martínez stretching things out into longer lines.
What does really draw me to this book is how Martínez spices up didactic pieces. “If there is life, it is public domain” (“Triple Execution in Mexico”) draws a really interesting line from now to 100 years ago. The two parallel voices speaking in “Brown I see you, Brown I Don’t” make for an interesting dialogue. The series “Casta Paintings, an Erotics of Negation” and “Museum of the Americas” are telling historical tales of identity formation, but the poetic prose puts a spring in their steps. Sometimes the didactic does seem to take over—the untitled piece on p. 42 is like a conclusion at the end of an academic article, and the untitled piece on p. 16 seems like it could have done without the closing line, “The cast: kinky historiographical exhibitionism. Sextastic.” Sometimes it felt like he didn’t trust me to connect the dots on my own.
All that being said, I can't think of another book like this. Martínez is wrestling with heady concepts, and his hands extend into the outer reaches to teach us about the historical roots of contemporary prejudices, to remind us that the US-Mexico border has long been a site of physical and political violence. He also reminds us, by focusing on themes of family and love, that we can draw strength from one another instead of venom.
June 12, 2023
I don’t think this collection is bad, but I think it was maybe too high brow for me. A cabinet of curiosities, but in the form of poems, was incredibly clever. As a creative historian, the use of prose with historical artifacts and documents absolutely thrilled me. It’s like Martinez acted as docent, guiding me through his family narrative as well as the historical macabre Anglo treatment of Mexican and Indigenous peoples. I would love to read more historical poetry collections formatted like this.
Unfortunately, I was lost by a lot of the inaccessible language. And I wish Martinez had provided more context and access to the historical documents referenced. Like a landing page website would have been awesome because some of the documents were difficult to find and having to repeatedly reference Google interrupted the flow of reading through this collection.
Unfortunately, I was lost by a lot of the inaccessible language. And I wish Martinez had provided more context and access to the historical documents referenced. Like a landing page website would have been awesome because some of the documents were difficult to find and having to repeatedly reference Google interrupted the flow of reading through this collection.
November 23, 2019
This is an interesting blend of poetry and nonfiction that tackles imperialism in the Mexican/American dynamic. The poetry is spliced with real neurological studies on racial identification, primary sources from the early 1840s-1900s when America was at least more obviously exploitative and racist.
The poetry contains language that I could never hope of attaining. It's good. But I got much more out of the nonfiction. But it was fun to alternately learn some history and also marvel at some linguistic acrobatics.
I obtained this book by accident. And yay, it was good.
Recommended for poets with a proclivity toward history.
The poetry contains language that I could never hope of attaining. It's good. But I got much more out of the nonfiction. But it was fun to alternately learn some history and also marvel at some linguistic acrobatics.
I obtained this book by accident. And yay, it was good.
Recommended for poets with a proclivity toward history.
September 23, 2023
4.5*
I'm not gonna lie, some of this I had to re-read one, two, three times to understand it, but that's not a fault on the poem, it's just me not being used to this kind of poetry, as I'm pretty new to this poetry scene.
This is the first of many poetry books I'm going to be reading this year (thanks English major) from a collection of Latinx authors, and I'm glad we started off strong.
Martinez has crafted a collection of poetry that goes through the classification of Latinx identities in the Americas, and the way in which these historical events have caused pain and frustration.
Again, I'm not the one to go for for a good poetry review, but I liked this one!
I'm not gonna lie, some of this I had to re-read one, two, three times to understand it, but that's not a fault on the poem, it's just me not being used to this kind of poetry, as I'm pretty new to this poetry scene.
This is the first of many poetry books I'm going to be reading this year (thanks English major) from a collection of Latinx authors, and I'm glad we started off strong.
Martinez has crafted a collection of poetry that goes through the classification of Latinx identities in the Americas, and the way in which these historical events have caused pain and frustration.
Again, I'm not the one to go for for a good poetry review, but I liked this one!
May 17, 2020
Hmm… I didn’t enjoy this as much as I thought I would. I think it was a stylistic thing than anything, but I absolutely loved the nuanced exploration of Mexican immigration and the body.
Some favorites: “Instructions for Identifying ‘Illegal’ Immigrants,” “Lord, Spanglish Me,” “Bodies of 3 Men Lying as They Fell After Being Executed,” “On the Naturalization of Alien Immigrants,” and “Skin Maps.”
Some favorites: “Instructions for Identifying ‘Illegal’ Immigrants,” “Lord, Spanglish Me,” “Bodies of 3 Men Lying as They Fell After Being Executed,” “On the Naturalization of Alien Immigrants,” and “Skin Maps.”
Read
September 26, 2023Falls in the unrateable category for me. 5 stars for the technical execution and craftsmanship in writing. I would think the collection will most likely be included in The Canon (if it hasn’t already for high school/ early college reading; one star because it requires enrolling in a seminar class to fully access the poetry emotionally.
It was longlisted deservedly so for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry.
It was longlisted deservedly so for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry.
April 16, 2019
At times, I found this collection too prosaic, and at other times too abstract-- but there are plenty moments of beauty and truth in these poems. There are many times when J. Michael Martinez's focus seems to be on teaching the audience. While these moments tend to become prose-heavy lectures, they have important historical and artistic value, and I appreciated the opportunity to learn.
August 5, 2019
I don't want to detract from Martinez' skill as a poet, but I did not enjoy this collection. My poetic tastes these days run largely to artists like Billy Collins. In this collection, at least, Martinez gives us a poetics of racial, political, ethnic, and cultural angst and anguish that's painful to read. I prefer being uplifted by poetry, not dejected.
October 6, 2020
Really great experimentations with form as he engages with museums & history/historiography through his poems, both on a more broad level (Mexican-American history) and also his personal family history. Sharp and moving.
I was reminded a little of Joy Harjo's Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings in subject & some of the form and of Brenda Shaughnessy's The Octopus Museum.
I was reminded a little of Joy Harjo's Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings in subject & some of the form and of Brenda Shaughnessy's The Octopus Museum.
December 30, 2020
I love how the author doesn’t beat a dead horse: by this I mean that when something is poetic he just lets the scene speak for itself. In particular I found fascinating what he did with the postcard section of the book. The idea of someone making postcards depicting death is so powerful in itself that he lets you write your own poetry for it in your mind, and does very little elaboration on his part.
September 11, 2021
While at times this book got a little graduate-school-seminar-paper for me, I appreciated the project of this book immensely. And that balance between the heady intellectualism and the bodily experience was astonishing at times.
Two favorites:
"Of Maximo and Bartola, the Aztec Children"
"Brown I See You, Brown I Don't"
Two favorites:
"Of Maximo and Bartola, the Aztec Children"
"Brown I See You, Brown I Don't"
June 4, 2020
3.5. Parts are very good, but too often it comes off as an exercise in vocabulary. Martinez’s command of language is impressive, as is his ability to address the complexity of the Latinx experience. At some points here it just feels like more of an unnecessary flex than a talent.
December 4, 2018
A moving collection of poems. 'Where Love is Ground to Wheat' is particularly memorable.
July 19, 2019
AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
So much to love. I look forward to rereading this because Im sure I didn’t get it all the first time.
Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
So much to love. I look forward to rereading this because Im sure I didn’t get it all the first time.
January 30, 2021
I love the cover but not so much of the contents. What a disappointment.
August 25, 2022
Really enjoyed this execution of a compelling premise-using poetry to describe artifacts in a museum as a way of exploring the legacy of colonialism.
June 18, 2024
An ambitious project. I found it interesting, but far from exciting.
October 8, 2024
The poems are broken down in 5-parts all beautifully written I loved so much the different styles of poems
March 23, 2020
This was challenging to read. The more I re-read, discuss, and think about it, the more I admire it.
Read
February 24, 2023“We are too many skies, we who cling to the visible, & the bread of my routines, now absent of you, are abundant with you.”
•••
This is a chewy, thoughtful collection of poetry that examines the impact of colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy on the cultural, historical, and personal narratives. It's powerful for a host of reasons!
•••
This is a chewy, thoughtful collection of poetry that examines the impact of colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy on the cultural, historical, and personal narratives. It's powerful for a host of reasons!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews