The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez

by Iliana Rocha

The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez chronicles an obsession with the 1971 unsolved murder of Rocha’s grandfather while interrogating the true crime genre, tabloid culture, immigrant identity, the phenomena of missing and murdered women, troubled relationships with law enforcement, and the intersection of prose and poetry. Because the details of his death were (and are) terribly unclear, part of how the family reconstructed him was to share the different accounts heard over the decades, and this collection attempts to pin down these shifts and contours through destabilizing form and genre. Each speaker reconfigures a past mysterious and tenuous, clouded by distance, language, and time in order to demonstrate how Inocencio Rodriguez defies a single narrative.

Genres: Poetry

103 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2022

About the author

Iliana Rocha is an American poet and writer from Texas. She is the 2019 winner of the Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry for her newest collection, The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, Karankawa, her debut, won the 2014 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). The recipient of a 2020 CantoMundo fellowship and 2019 MacDowell fellowship, she has had work featured or forthcoming in the Best New Poets 2014 anthology, as well as Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, Latin American Literature Today, Oxford American, and Blackbird among others, and she serves as Poetry Co-Editor for Waxwing Literary Journal. She earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her three chihuahuas Nilla, Beans, and Migo are the loves of her life.

Reviews

[LaVeRB · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps taking Bruce Springsteen a bit too literally, all-star baseball player Ken Caminiti was undone by a speedball in 2004. His death was somewhat enigmatic, though reporters were eventually able to piece it together: just a few days after being released from prison in Houston, he went into cardiac arrest in the Bronx apartment of a man he’d never met before. His fatal heart attack seems to have been the result of cocaine and heroin.

In “Ken Caminiti Dies in a Houston Hotel,” one of the poems featured in Iliana Rocha’s new collection, The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, the 1996 NL MVP gets the Monroe rather than the DiMaggio treatment. Rocha—evidently a sports fan, as she prominently features a Houston Oilers jacket in her author photo—casts Caminiti in an erotic light. She recalls going to see him play at the Astrodome, “where I felt the seat / get wet with sex anticipation, those arms, that swing, that giant / bulge that seemed to symbolize third base, cheeks swollen with chew like the bag where he’d rest his cleat.”

Rocha deserves credit for making chewing tobacco sound sexy. (The joke about “third base” is a little juvenile, yet it still lands.) But her Caminiti isn’t just a hunky ballplayer with massive forearms; he’s a man with an “enlarged heart” who winds up dead at 41 under initially mysterious circumstances, the subject of myths and misinformation (e.g. that he was found dead in a Houston hotel).

Read the entire review here: https://lasvegasreviewofbooks.com/poe...

[Kenna Lengi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this for a poetry class and loved it. The works of Iliana Rocha invoke deep and sometimes unsettling imagery. Truly inspiring.