Be Recorder: Poems

by Carmen Giménez

Carmen Giménez Smith dares to demand renewal for a world made unrecognizable

Be Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world. The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines that excoriate and sanctify. Carmen Giménez Smith turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion—against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it. This reckoning with self and nation demonstrates that who and where we are is as conditional as the fact of our compliance: “Miss America from sea to shining sea / the huddled masses have a question / there is one of you and all of us.” Be Recorder is unrepentant and unstoppable, and affirms Giménez Smith as one of our time’s most vital and vivacious poets.

Genres: Poetry, Adult, Queer, The United States Of America, Social Justice, Read For School, Gender

88 pages, Paperback

First published August 6, 2019

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm doing well here with finalists for the 2019 National Book Awards. For poetry, that is. The other two I've read are The Tradition (Jericho Brown) and Deaf Republic (Ilya Kaminsky). Please don't ask about the fiction and nonfiction finalists, however. The only fiction one I've read I abandoned (Black Leopard, Red Wolf), and the nonfiction titles were all strangers in the night to me.

Back to Be Recorder. Comprised of three sections, the book tackles more than a body'd expect: motherhood, daughterhood, race, popular culture, feminism, violence, vanity, and yes, Star Wars. What looks like poetic overload for a poet, Giménez Smith pulls off with aplomb.

Me, I liked the more traditional poems of Part One: "Creation Myth," particularly the opening poem "Origins," which speaks to identity, and the third, "Boy Crazy," wherein the speaker wishes for the nighttime freedom boys enjoyed over girls.

Part Two is the title poem, stretching out across 46 pages. Ambitious. Resistant. Rebellious. Yet troubled by doubts.

Part Three, "Birthright," returns to shorter poems, including the exploration of her mother's decline to Alzheimer's, a regrettable muse that inspired Rebecca Solnit, too, in some essays I recently read.

Overall, some solid moments. Were I to judge from the three, I'd give it to Deaf Republic, but no judge in his right mind judges before reading the entire list. And so, two to go.

[el · Rating 3 out of 5]

i was way more into the first one-third of this, and then it felt like the book lost momentum or became something else entirely. too much ground to cover with not enough restraint or style for me tbh. 2.9/5.

a few gorgeous standout moments though:

I worry that when birds take her into / themselves, / she’ll become a fleck of their transience, but this is how we permeate / the cosmos, the twin of our breaths into wind, into / carbon, / into the tree’s colossal fingers reaching back from inside the earth.

[Jerrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Be Recorder is a collection of poems about contemporary America, consumerism/capitalism, and what it’s like being the child of Latin American immigrants in America. Great form and use of language. One of my favorites from the shortlist.

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Felt completely disconnected from the poems when I started this sometime in October and then after getting back to Be Recorder yesterday with a much clearer head the long poem and other poems/prose pieces felt more like a reality I'm familiar with as a child of immigrants.

edit: Okay, Goodreads destroyed the formatting on the poem I posted so here's a better though still not perfect attempt:

https://sleepwalking.nu/post/18910401...

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Not every poem hit home for me, and sometimes the poems just wanted me to work harder than I was willing to work.  At times, I found myself reluctant to pick it up because I didn't want to do the work.  

But the book is worth it solely for this poem, which is absolute FIRE

No Apology: A Poemifesto
Isn’t there a line by Yusef Komunyakaa, “I apologize for the eyes in my head.” Maybe what I am trying to say is that I apologize for the sight in my eyes.
—Susan Briante

I would love to make a proposal, and it is out of love,
not patronizing love but true revolutionary love, and it won’t
upset the orbit tomorrow. So here’s where I’d like
to begin, and this might be the hardest thing you’ve tried to do,
or maybe you already do it and I’m grateful for you
because you’ve inspired me. I know it’s the hardest thing
for me because I haven’t done it consistently (not at all, sorry),
but I want to recommend that we stop apologizing.
Today I counted and I said I’m sorry approximately 22 times.
I apologized for my setting my stuff down on the counter at Kroger.
I apologized for being behind someone at a copy machine.
I apologized for someone else bumping into a stranger.
I apologized for taking longer than a minute to explain an idea.
Suffice it to say I am sorry all the time.
I won’t tell you what to do because that makes me
an implicit solicitor of sorry. Personally,
when the word comes into my mouth, I’m going to shape it into
a seed to plant in another woman’s aura as love. I only ask
that we get started. This will be our first step in world domination.

I never figured out exactly what "Be Recorder" meant.  There is a very long central poem with that title, but it is full of surreal scenes and run-on sentences and I wasn't sure what to make of it all.  It is broken into sections, such as:

am I the mariner          
and whose bird was it    
and how  does absolution
work and are counter-
histories in your allusions
and am I your audience or
am I actually the one who louses
up the place a sign of the raptures  
to come am I the false flag operation
of crisis actors in a San Mateo
high school down the way
from a #secession billboard
will I be reincarnated as elephant  
as king as flea as barnacle
why am I the locus of your discontent  
and not your president
your intimate the landlord
an aesthetic overlord
how do I hang from your neck    
with such ease and when
will I be graced with immunity

And I feel like I ALMOST understand, but not quite.

[André Habet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this cross 3 days. The titular poem is an epic that moves through scales, forms, and voices to create a piece that polyphonically resonates across space-time. Favorite lines,

"I've learned most from the cracked
Once I broke into pieces
Now I break into wholes.
('Be Recorder', 31)

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 3/4 stars

[Alarie]

Smith’s book is one of five on the short list for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry. I will not post a low rating or diss a nominee. Taste is a personal thing, so I’ll just say that Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky is one of the most impressive poetry books I’ve ever read, and it is also up for this award.

[Salty Swift · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uncompromising. Direct. Searching for meaning and identity. Nothing is sacred. No holds barred. This prose collection is the bomb. If there's one set of poems you'll need to devour, it's this gem.

[alyssa · Rating 5 out of 5]

so good I read it twice through

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books in a year of great books. Gimenez is a national treasure.

[Sonja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carmen Gimenez’s book Be Recorder is the most exciting book I have read during this 2023 Sealey Challenge. So glad I read it for it speaks of what I feel is important—the world is in decay because of capitalism/colonialism/ imperialism and immigrants and people of color and women are unsung heroes. Not to put ancestors on a pedestal or to demonize anyone
At the end of “In Remembrance of Their Labors” :
“To the future flor de canción, innovator, and disturber of the story, I say, coalesce and rise. Destroy. In remembrance: kick and scream para el carajo.”
Quoting her is unjust. The book is a whole poem. I read it in one sitting and couldn’t stop. Of course her poetry is not for everyone. But nevertheless, I highly recommend it

[Liz Mc2]

Work and consumerism and life as a Latinx immigrant/child of immigrants in America and motherhood and daughterhood. I liked this one a lot.

[Ery Caswell · Rating 3 out of 5]

there are some power hitters in here and likely that just means I need to revisit but unfortunately a lot of these poems did not remain with me

[Corey]

TBRed after great VS Podcast interview.

[Carey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a lot of complicated thoughts on this collection. On the one hand, I enjoyed a number of the poems in this and found the titular poem especially to be an interesting examination of identity. On the other hand, the collection as a whole tried to cover so very many different concepts. It was hard to view this as a cohesive work, especially with the titular poem being over 50% of the work. I think the titular poem should have been a separate work and the first and third section their own work. I also struggled to understand exactly what "be recorder" meant. I at times thought it meant to be a recorder of the times we're living in, of the fears one has, or the conflict of assimilation. However, the way the phrase is used in the poem doesn't really align with this interpretation which leaves me to wonder what was was I supposed to be understanding that I'm clearly not? Oh well, some are hits and some are misses!

[sweet orange books · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I had one poetry book in my collection, it would be this one.

I will simply forget "American Mythos", disrupter of the sublime.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This excerpt sums up this delicious collection for me:

anger was my primary breathing
apparatus for so long
what a mixed blessing when it worked
I’ve learned the most from the cracked
once I broke into pieces
now I break into wholes

[Keely · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poems in Be Recorder explore themes of identity, country, immigrant experience, race, class, harsh economic realities, resistance, and, to a lesser degree, family relationships. I enjoyed the conventionally punctuated poems in the first and third sections most, including “No Apology: A Poemifesto,” a poem declaring the speaker’s intention to stop saying “sorry” with every other breath, and “Beasts,” which describes the experience of watching a parent’s alarming decline due to dementia. On the other hand, I had a very tough time connecting with the long title poem that makes up the heart of the book. I think I get what “Be Recorder” means, coming as it does from a speaker who expresses a desire to step outside of the culture and economy in which they find themselves—observing, recording, capturing an endless stream of consciousness. However, getting it didn’t make it any easier to push through. It reads like a dense theory text I would have been assigned in cultural studies class in graduate school. Nothing wrong with that. Clearly, there is something very timely and compelling going on in this National Book Award-nominated collection. It just doesn’t happen to align very well with what I want from poetry.

[Dree · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection was...interesting. I really liked some poems, especially those dealing with her mother's Alzheimer's disease and modern American consumerism.

In the bulk of these poems, the author just seems angry. Angry at her parents' expectations, at all of the white people around her, at how people treat her, at the US and Americans (even though she is American and has been since birth, though if I understand correctly she does not agree), at everyone not Latinx, at the American expectation of women to have no/blonde body hair (yet she uses Madonna as an example of a woman with dark body hair, but being half Italian she is just another white woman). Basically, she just seems very very angry. But is that who she is all of the time, or is that what she was trying to explore in this collection? Is this her anger about how her mother, a Peruvian immigrant, did not get to enjoy the fruits of her labor in this country, instead getting this horrible disease? I have no idea. I have a couple other books of hers, and if I get to them before they are due I may have a better idea.

Also--the author attended San Jose State, probably at the same time my brother was there.

[Marian P · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carmen Gimenez Smith’s Be Recorder, a National Book Award Finalist and LA Times Book of the Year, a collection of poetry covers myriad topics such as racial identity and class issues and offers indictments of capitalism and Trumpism. But it is so much more than just a collection of poems as three sections unify the compilation: Creation Myth marks major passages such as ethnic identity, class origins, childhood, family and the age-old rite, the job interview; Be Recorder forms the bulk of the collection as with caustic indictments of the exploitation of natural resources, tokenism in academe, Otherness in the U.S., the publishing industry, and Trump politics; and Birthright centers on Gimenez Smith’s legacy as Latinx artist, writer, poet, mother, and daughter. In short, this book is a tour de force.

In all honesty writing this review makes me slightly gun shy because I read poetry infrequently and may lack the literary context necessary to do it justice. Nevertheless, this is one of the first books in which I have felt seen and understood. I think I knew that this book was going resonate deeply from the first poem titled “Origins.” The poem conveys the modus operandi that many of us as Latinx persons—and POC in general— encounter when we are mistaken for another brown person striving in a professional world, or in this case, academia. These words came at me like a ton of bricks: “People sometimes confuse me for someone else they know/because they’ve projected an idea onto me. I’ve developed/a second sense for this—some call it paranoia—but I call it/ the profoundest consciousness on the face of the earth./The gift was passed on to me from my mother who learned it from/solid and socially constructed doors whooshing inches from her face.”

The act of others seeing you but not actually being seen is akin to being put inside a glass-enclosed box where people (society) can perceive you but not engage with you to truly know you. The process of socially constructing identity does occurs when we are boxed in by stereotypes with little or no understanding of our realities. In this strident poem, we learn that the narrator has been misinterpreted as a student with another Latinx-sounding name in a graduate school seminar by a professor who has not taken the time to become acquainted with either student with a “what you might call a brown name.” In graduate school, some of us Latinx students work twice or three times as hard as others to stay on top of the heap alongside ‘trust fund babies” or other independently wealthy students at elite institutions. While at the same time, we may be misconstrued as campus dining commons workers—our brown compatriots-- or are told by our landlady not to “invite all of our relatives to monopolize the apartment complex.” (both were my lived experiences years ago) We experience routine micro aggression that makes us either sink into quicksand (my feelings the first year) or become the most resilient Teflon (my feelings year two and three). Toward the end of the poem, Gimenez Smith concedes that she has forged a unique identity working her lifetime to make her singularity known.

The middle section with which the book derives its title includes scathing indictments of a world gone wrong. And perhaps this is with which Gimenez Smith is intent to “be [the] recorder.” There are critiques of the exploitation of natural resources and the retrograde vantage which is described as “shitting on the giant tapestry of the nation.” There are poems capturing the “otherness” of what seems to be the academy or the publishing industry designated as “the august king” wherein a sense of otherness is tokenized as a “gesture phoned-in.” The extent to which Gimenez Smith is on the pulse of society is uncanny. In another stellar poem, she eviscerates the Trumpians who “built the US bunker in heaven/for the citizens who filled shelves/ with formula guns toilet paper plates.” Later, she expresses how those same Trumpians hold many in contempt for being “too marimacha but not macho enuf. . . too Black. . .too uppity . . .or the saucy Univision talking head/ who roasts oligarchs while the big network reports on repeat that alien brown bodies/ killed a woman in that haven San Francisco.” Throughout, she calls out these gross exaggerations and the harm that they cause those hemmed in by them. The poem ends in angry defiance of the world in which this discordant era of politics have engendered. In the end, the narrator is a woman on the rise.

The final section of the book titled Birthright seems to speak to the author’s legacy. She places herself on a continuum of life inhabiting myriad roles as a worker, a poet, a lover, a queer, a mother, a daughter, an aging woman, and all of those sources of inspiration coming to a head in the final poem, which serves as a “confessional”, “Ars Poetica.” The book sings with meaning for Latinx, POCs, queer, and others who have been traditionally marginalized. To hear the angry indictments of so much that is wrong with the world and society allows space to be carved out for voices artists and others who may reject capitalism, Latinx and other POCs who may be either feel invisible or boxed in alternately, and the queer who may also be misconstrued. I felt like the giant glass box had been utterly shattered in these poems. Read this work. Devour this work. It is highly recommended for those interested in poetry and works on the intersections of race and identity.

[Luke Gorham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Parts I and II are absolute fire. Part III skews personal in nature, and as such becomes more of a subjective thematic experience than the more broad-reaching ideas of its precedent sections. Didn't quite land as forcefully for me, so the collection ended on a downward trajectory, but that's a small complaint here.

[Dee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incandescent.

[Chuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the fourth of the 5 finalists for last year's National Book Award for poetry that I have completed. Rating: 3.5

If nothing else, this collection is impressive in it's velocity and ambition. Clearly a lot of people like it more that I did and I realize I may piss them off with some of my reactions, but there is a lot to admire here as well. Gimenez Smith's very autobiographical poems are strongly informed by her Latinx experience and the racial crisis of our current times provides much inspiration. Be Recorder has an awesome mythical etching cover design that appropriately reflect its dense over-laying of ideas and sources. The collection is divided into three sections, each with a distinctly different style and/or theme.

The first section is called "Creation Myth", starting with a poem called "Origins", then touching on a variety of topics we assume are central to the poet. Right away we are introduced to Gimenez Smith's scattershot, free associating poems, that read more like prose with several poems formatted in regular paragraphs rather than verses. Although they touch upon dozens of important issues, I struggled here to connect to a driving idea and to find the mindset or voice of these poems. The last two poems of this section began to bring things together for me: "No Apology: A Poemifesto" a meditation on being a woman who apologizes for nearly everything and commits to changing the word when it comes into her throat "into a seed to plant in another woman's aura as love. I only ask that we get started. This is our first step toward world domination." Then, "Flat Earth Dream Soliloquy" seems to embrace the philosophy of the Flat Earth theory - not as fact, but as an approach that can provide new answers to life's problems.

The second section, "Be Recorder", is one long piece made up of 37 individual poems. I had a tough time with this section. The free associating shifts are so fast - with nearly every line - that I found it pretty exhausting to get through. At times it was like being stuck on a public train with someone suffering from schizophrenia giving you a blow by blow account of what they think and see. In my experience of encountering these situations, there are often brilliant and beautiful and true points that get expressed before the person shifts into a new thought, as do the poems in this section. On the other hand, it occurred to me that these poems reminded me of something more grounded - freestyle rapping. I can imagine that it could be thrilling to hear these poems performed with the energy they seem to have been written in.

As I finished "Be Recorder", I found myself planning to speed through the final section, called "Birthright". However, this is where the payoff was for me. Here the poet ties her themes into reflections of her relationship with family and how they connect to the poems that came before. We learn about her parents and the beginning of surrender to their influence on who she has become. Confrontations with decay and mortality kick in with "As Body II" which opens with "The soul needs no self-reference..." In "Beasts" we learn that her mother has some form of severe dementia that she struggles, along with her siblings, to come to terms with - "And we made a cabal of medieval scholars speculating how many splinters of light made up her core, how much we might harvest before she disappears."

"American Mythos" is long, beautiful meditation, which builds on references to Star Wars, as she tried to understand why she has lied to her own son over a trivial thing. The tender, longing "Only a Shadow" hits deep with the relationship with her daughter and it brings her face to face with the temporal nature of that relationship and, well, everything else: "My daughter is now the pulse I toss into the wind with the seeds, Particles of us pass over like whispers through the cosmos, upon the clatter the wind makes."

There are many jewels to be found in this collection but you're going to have to work for them.

[Jamjun Rorsoongnern · Rating 5 out of 5]

The variety of themes, from motherhood to cultural/legal citizenship, origins, race, parent/child dynamics, and more delicious entanglements, is potent and mobile. The depth that the poet is able to dive into without being engulfed in darkness is impressive. Fluctuating between tones of seriousness, humor, and playfulness helps to energize this collection through its heavy thematics.

This collection made me giggle, wince, smile, ache, and reflect in a beautiful way. As a bipolar, queer daughter of an immigrant, this collection resonated deep into my bones and felt like stepping into the sun on a spring day. Just enough cold breeze to wake you up and keep you engaged, but warm enough to feel open and comfortable. It can be a lot to emotionally process and sit with but in a rewarding and affirming way. Definitely take breaks to process the collection; it’s not a bedtime or beach read.

Some of the other (lower star) reviews here accidentally speak to the project that this collection is attempting, specifically about the politics of labor (physical and intellectual) and how the political/thematic scope of the subjugated is often expansive beyond the oppressor’s consciousness or effort of engagement. Particularly, that the depth of lived experience for subjugated people is “too much work” to comprehend or read shallowly as “angry” (which, you should read The Uses of Anger by Audre Lorde if your intuition is to call women of color angry but whatever). Yes, this is work to read if you do not come from the perspective or consciousness of the author, but that’s the whole point! (literally, re-read any of the poems that mention the word labor)

Anyway, mini rant aside, I adored this collection, and it's a wonderful, energetic exploration of diverse themes.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first collection by Giménez Smith that I have read, and I picked it up based on the “National Book Award Finalist” sticker—I have often enjoyed the finalists more than the collections that ended up winning this particular prize. In this case, I wasn’t such a fan. There are range of forms—long lines, short lines, prose pieces, poems written in shapes. Unsurprisingly (because it comprises the majority of the book), the Be Recorder sequence had what I thought were the best pieces. Those poems have no punctuation and, honestly, I think would sound awesome to hear them read out loud. I kept having to make my eyes slow down, because they just wanted to keep going past where periods would (I imagine) typically be. The piece that closes the Be Recorder section is probably my favorite piece in the book.

I felt like this collection is a hammer, very didactic in tone. And it’s not like things are being said that I don’t agree with, but it’s a lot. But, we are in (and were in in 2019) a really charged moment. Still, personally, I would have enjoyed more of “her disease had no true beginning, only a gradual peeling away / until she was left a live wire of disquiet” (Beasts). Flipping back through, I underlined many really cool lines or groups, but didn’t feel as blown away by so many entire poems. As I said above, I think my opinion of a live reading would be super positive—the frenetic energy I felt would probably come across more clearly.

[Steve Chisnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gimenez wrestles with the inter-sectional identities which themselves contend: they demand her internal attention, threaten to unbalance, all while simultaneously being subsumed under these same identities defining her from without. What results is a compelling, vulnerable, and finally insistent collection that cannot know what comes next: but what we can do/be is recorder, the resistance to forgetting, to oversight, to rationalization.

Gimenez is no lightweight in understanding the demand: our language, our politics, our ideologies, our own psychological subversions ever seek to rewrite the world back to "normalcy" of a status quo. Caught up in a tradition of gaming our "othering," a thoughtless strategizing "away," we dismiss the nuance and struggles of those we meet.

And what do we miss? The joys and challenges of parenting, of adapting, of laughing, of wondering.

Not many poems in this collection stand singly as superior to another; in fact, they might/should be read collectively across the book; the kind of embrace that no more witness could ever offer.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems about contemporary America, consumerism/capitalism, and being the child of Latin American immigrants in America.

from Self as Deep as Coma: "When I was a girl, I collected reams paper, soothed / by the white over and over, the hope of starting / from blank. I hoped to endure being well enough, / to conjure a new bright vessel because I wanted to live."

from Be Recorder: "brown bodies brown / murdered bodies and drowned / bodies brown repelled bodies / uncounted brown bodies / on borders in boats from hurricanes / in holds and shipping / containers against walls the new word / for global encroachment"

from I Will Be My Mother's Apprentice: "Sometimes it is / like a poem that is not quite realized / filled with hollows and bursts, / a stranger's grief and rage."

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an intense collection dealing with the status of Latinx immigrants/second gen immigrants in the current State, and how that is uncomfortably entangled with the poets identity. The beginning deals with their past; the titular middle section is raw and angry and frustrated layers of image and sound reflecting dealing with the current; the last section moves through present speculating to the future. It’s super timely and emotional so I can see why it’s received so much acclaim, but I had a hard time really connecting — probably my upper middle class whiteness speaking, more than anything.

[Barbette]

I can't assign a starred rating to this. "Be Recorder" is comprised of three sections and is, essentially, three different, small books. One of those books deserves five stars.

"Be Recorder" is the title of the second section within this volume, but this collection could have been titled "Birthright." The poems within that third section speak of universal themes- parents, children, disease, loss, love, genetic imprint, Star Wars, and what-will-the-future-hold- in language dripping with intelligent and sensual beauty. I felt most moved by "Beasts," an elegy for a mother's mind lost to Alzheimers.