After Rubén

by Francisco Aragón

After Rubén unfolds as a decades-long journey in poems and prose, braiding the personal, the political & the historical, interspersing along the way English-language versions & riffs of a Spanish-language master: Rubén Darío. Whether it’s biting portraits of public figures, or nuanced sketches of his father, Francisco Aragón has assembled his most expansive collection to date, evoking his native San Francisco, but also imagining ancestral spaces in Nicaragua. Readers will encounter pieces that splice lines from literary forebearers, a moving elegy to a sibling, a surprising epistle from the grave. In short: a book that is both trajectory & mosaic, complicating the conversation surrounding poetry in the Americas—above all as it relates to Latinx and queer poetics.

Genres: Poetry, Latinx

160 pages, Paperback

First published May 5, 2020

About the author

Francisco Aragón (1968) is a Latino poet, editor and writer.

Reviews

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of poetry is like a mirrored column, showing the facets of Aragon's history and passions, his English life, or life-in-English, and his life-in-Spanish, which is home and family, his Nicaraguan parents, his growing up in the Mission district of San Francisco, and his deep affinity for Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario, also gay, whose affair with another poet the latter denied after Dario's death. There is history, there is politics, our historical moment expressed as clarity.

Aragon is a generous and somewhat self-effacing poet--we rarely see the "I" in these poems, but we feel the speaker. There are poems for his father, for his mother, poems for and "with" other poets--collaborations and tributes, as well as, in an appendix, ten poems by Ruben Dario., who we learn was Aragon's mother's favorite poet. An essay, My Ruben, towards the back of the book, was interestingly positioned, as we read the poems before this more grounding information--which naturally propelled me back through the book again.

1985
Long and black, the streaks
of gray, aflutter in the light
wind as she prepares to tell

her story at the Federal Building:
reaching into a tattered sack
she pulls out a doll...

missing an eye, balding--
snagged face smudged with soot
from the smoke her home took in

as her village was being shelled.
Next she retrieves what's left
of a book--a few pages...

she raises one, starts to read aloud:

por la mañana sube el sol y clienta el día
la tierra nos da donde vivir y que comer
la vaca nos da leche para beber y hacer mantequilla.

It's her daughter's lesson
the poem she read to her
the day they struck...."

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in preparation for travel to Nicaragua, although I'm not much at reading poetry.
I appreciated the informative Foreword by Michael Dowdy.
Here are some selections I liked:
30-33 Photo, 1945 and Foto, 1945 - good to read a poem in both English and Spanish
34-35 Gloria’s - second-hand clothing store, a father who has moved on to his second family
61-66 The Man and the Wolf (after Ruben Dario’s “Los motives del lobo” at 131-135), about St Francis of Assisi
76-77 We Talk Dogs - conversation with long-distant father - Managua, Panama, California
83 Seashell - translation of/reference to Caracol by Ruben Dario at 136
105-108 January 21, 2013 imagined letter to Sergio from Ruben “You see: those letters to Amado were real”
111 Poem Beginning with a Fragment of Andres Montoya - for Leticia Hernandez-Linares, Salvadoran author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl: Poems (Tia Chucha Press 2015). I own a copy of that book, purchased after listening to the author read from it in Washington, DC; now I have to go read it.
115-124 My Ruben essay
125-142 Ten poems by Ruben Dario

references to people and places in San Francisco, Nicaragua, El Salvador

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not know of Ruben Dario, an influential Nicaraguan poet or Aragon, a poet from San Francisco whose parents came from Nicaragua. This is a rich exploration of Aragon's influences, from parents or grandparents lives or migration, to translations or poems inspired by Dario, along with images and moments from his own life. You don't have to know Ruben or Spanish (a few of the poems are in Spanish as are many scattered phrases) to appreciate these beautiful poems and insightful essays. I'm so glad I picked it up.

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

tell me of an affliction more acute than breathing

your skin is bitter like suffering what have you done voting for trump

What could be worse than a bitter mediocre artist with a plan?