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Solstice
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. Emmy Pérez sings the borderlands between America and Mexico, a contested land where identity and nationality are under constant surveillance. Her poetry forces the reader to feel the persons who live in those lands. In poems that follow the currents of the Rio Grande, she re-immerses readers in the waters where we all developed, fills our senses with the scent of blooming roses, of burning mesquite, and crashes us into the barriers erected to prevent the development of cross-border relationships. Reading Pérez ignites the desire to experience the heat and the sere landscape, and generates anger at the destruction of all that flourishes there. "Emmy Pérez's poems are elegantly political, never polemical. They discover the beauty in revolution without romanticizing its hardships. From the first moment I encountered her poems, I knew I was meeting a singular voice--one that can find lyricism in struggle, dignity in injustice. Her voice sings of landscape and longing with deftness of image and diction. What a welcome debut."--Allison Joseph "The new generation of Latina poets will be noted for the work of writers such as Emmy Pérez. Her poems are houses of light, reminding us that family and culture survive the political realities and darkness of our time."--Ray Gonzalez, The Bloomsbury Review "The poetry of Emmy Pérez celebrates and grieves borders, the division between countries, between generations, between poverty and sustenance. Pérez's precise and soulful language erases boundaries. Everything is given reverence, and she asks, alway, how she can honor what is lost... Two languages are barely enough to name her world."--Mary Jane Nealon "The people and ghosts who populate SOLSTICE define place by bridging and haunting the geography... Pérez creates geography through an exquisite attention to the natural surroundings... Within the descriptions of the desert, Pérez evokes lyric intensity through her surprising use of line-break... Not only does Pérez have an impeccable eye for the imagistic moment, but she also weaves these images into complex prosodic tension."--Craig Santos Perez, Rattle
- GenresPoetry
43 pages, Paperback
First published November 26, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 6, 2020
Solstice by Emmy Pérez, Swan Scythe Press (2003). I read this book in 2010, but I recently went back to it to honor my MFA in Creative Writing professor Pérez, who is the 2020 Texas Poet Laureate.
Pérez’s poems are filled with much potential—not meaning they are unfinished or unpolished; on the contrary: they’re so complete, so completely rich, so concentrated, and well-constructed—leaving the reader with enough splendid details coupled with mystery and at times a hint of surrealism and unanswered questions—that each is enough to sustain the reader’s own imagination to the point that the poems can potentially be re-imagined as a short story, a film short, or even the basis for a character in a novel.
Our shared humanity, our common fears, our collective memories, our search for self and home are brought to light as the poet peeks into the closed and shadowy spaces of our homes, our neighborhoods, our loins, our souls, and illuminates our shared brokenness, loss, anxieties, wants, and needs.
There’s a Hemingwayesque simplicity to some of the vignette-like poems and scenes that leave the reader not confused or dumbfounded and not necessarily wanting more, but rather the sort of writing that leaves a piece open to interpretation and possibility, allowing the reader to fill in the gaps not in the writing but via inferencing and recognition of allusions and symbolism.
Stylistically, Pérez makes meticulous use diction and wastes no words. She also uses enjambment and occasional use of italics to denote dialogue. Prose poems also appear in her collection. Pérez delves into the realm of definition, one of the most difficult forms of expression, with the ease, such as in "Where The Sun Rises."
In “The Border,” the speaker narrates a vignette-like poem as a family prepares to cross from Tijuana into San Diego—acutely aware of the abuela searching for her Green Card, “a parrot suffocating in mother’s purse,” and “cuetes, illegal fireworks stuffed safely in our underwear,” as she also alludes to a forebear’s undocumented crossing “many years ago.”
The use of imagery in Pérez’s poetry is formidable. In “Halladay Street,” for example, she kicks off a scene with “a mirage of gasoline/flooding ghosts of orange groves,” and goes on to describe what one might imagine as a group of men ogling a young lady on her way home from running errands with the truth bomb that “To be a man is to detect/bodies as they soften.”
The book is replete with thematic statements that ought reverberate with any reader. Any example here would be akin to a movie spoiler, for these gems must be sought for and harvested by the reader to be discovered using their own set of binoculars.
Pérez’s poems are filled with much potential—not meaning they are unfinished or unpolished; on the contrary: they’re so complete, so completely rich, so concentrated, and well-constructed—leaving the reader with enough splendid details coupled with mystery and at times a hint of surrealism and unanswered questions—that each is enough to sustain the reader’s own imagination to the point that the poems can potentially be re-imagined as a short story, a film short, or even the basis for a character in a novel.
Our shared humanity, our common fears, our collective memories, our search for self and home are brought to light as the poet peeks into the closed and shadowy spaces of our homes, our neighborhoods, our loins, our souls, and illuminates our shared brokenness, loss, anxieties, wants, and needs.
There’s a Hemingwayesque simplicity to some of the vignette-like poems and scenes that leave the reader not confused or dumbfounded and not necessarily wanting more, but rather the sort of writing that leaves a piece open to interpretation and possibility, allowing the reader to fill in the gaps not in the writing but via inferencing and recognition of allusions and symbolism.
Stylistically, Pérez makes meticulous use diction and wastes no words. She also uses enjambment and occasional use of italics to denote dialogue. Prose poems also appear in her collection. Pérez delves into the realm of definition, one of the most difficult forms of expression, with the ease, such as in "Where The Sun Rises."
In “The Border,” the speaker narrates a vignette-like poem as a family prepares to cross from Tijuana into San Diego—acutely aware of the abuela searching for her Green Card, “a parrot suffocating in mother’s purse,” and “cuetes, illegal fireworks stuffed safely in our underwear,” as she also alludes to a forebear’s undocumented crossing “many years ago.”
The use of imagery in Pérez’s poetry is formidable. In “Halladay Street,” for example, she kicks off a scene with “a mirage of gasoline/flooding ghosts of orange groves,” and goes on to describe what one might imagine as a group of men ogling a young lady on her way home from running errands with the truth bomb that “To be a man is to detect/bodies as they soften.”
The book is replete with thematic statements that ought reverberate with any reader. Any example here would be akin to a movie spoiler, for these gems must be sought for and harvested by the reader to be discovered using their own set of binoculars.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews