Cenzontle
112
Cenzontle
112eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Winner of the 2019 GLCA New Writers Award
An NPR Best Book of 2018
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781942683544 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BOA Editions, Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 04/10/2014 |
| Series: | A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America , #40 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 112 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Interior with Sudden Joy (FSG, 1999). Shaughnessy’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper's, The Nation, The Rumpus, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son and daughter.
Read an Excerpt
Cenzontle
Because the bird flew before
there was a word
for flight
years from now
there will be a name
for what you and I are doing.
I licked the mango of the sun—
between its bone and its name
between its color and its weight,
the night was heavier
than the light it hushed.
Pockets of unsteady light.
The bone—
the seed
inside the bone—
the echo
and its echo
and its shape.
Can you wash me without my body
coming apart in your hands?
Call it wound—
call it beginning—
The bird’s beak twisted
into a small circle of awe.
You called it cutting apart,
I called it song.
Esparto, California
Each pepper field is the same.
In each one I am a failed anthem.
I don’t know English
but there is so little
that needs translated out here.
For twelve hours I have picked
the same colored pepper.
Still I don’t know what country
does death belong to.
My skin is peeling.
Cual dios quisiera ser fuente?
If only I could choose what hurt.
An inheritance.
Those lost mothers bound
to the future of their blood.
I am walking again through the footage
where the white dress loses its shape.
Even moving my hands to sort
the peppers is a kind of running.
Hold still.
The child will sing because I was once her flag.
She will take my picture
—both groom and bride—
a country she has never seen.
I will give her the knife
to make her own camera.
The gift of shade and water—
the likeness of a star to possess.
And I am only half sick
if being sick
is just a bone waiting to harden.
I could be a saint
since there exists no pleasure
that wasn’t first abandoned to us out of boredom.
We traffic in the leftovers of ecstasy.
How lonely and inventive those angels were.
If I could speak their language,
I would tell them all my real name
—Antonia—
And with my curved knife,
I would rid them of all their failures.
First Wedding Dance
The music stopped playing years ago
but we’re still dancing.
There’s your bright skirt scissoring
through the crowd—
our hips tipping the instruments over.
You open me up and walk inside
until you reach a river
where a child is washing her feet.
You aren’t sure
if I am the child
or if I am the river.
You throw a stone
and the child wades in to find it.
This is memory.
Let’s say the river is too deep
so you turn around and leave
the same way you entered—
spent and unwashed.
It’s ok. We are young, and
our gowns are as long as the room.
I told you I always wanted a silk train.
We can both be the bride,
we can both empty our lover.
And there’s nothing different about you—
about me—about any of this.
Only that we wish it still hurt, just once.
Like the belts our fathers whipped us with,
not to hurt us but just to make sure we remembered.
Like the cotton ball, dipped in alcohol,
rubbed gently on your arm
moments before the doctor asks you to breathe.
Table of Contents
Foreword 9
Cenzontle 13
I
Origin of Drowning or Crossing the Rio Bravo 17
Immigration Interview with Don Francisco 20
Esparto, California 22
El Frutero 24
Chronology of Undocumented Mothers 25
Wetback 31
Dear Ramon 33
Century of Good Metal with Three Prayers 34
Sugar 35
Rituals of Healing 37
Fifteen Elegies 39
Immigration Interview with Jay Leno 42
Origin of Birds 44
II
"What You Can Know Is What You Have Made" 51
Origin of Prayer and Eden 54
Musical in Which You and I Play All the Roles 55
Essay on Synonyms for Tender and a Confession 59
Dulce 61
Bi-Glyph 63
Azúl Nocturne: Act 1 Scene 1 64
Drown 65
Your Sweetheart, Your Scientific Theory 66
First Gesture in Reverse 67
Gesture and Pursuit 69
Miss Lonelyhearts 70
Nuclear Fictions 73
Sub-Erotica Papers 75
First Wedding Dance 77
Pulling the Moon 79
How to Grow the Brightest Geranium 80
III
Origin of Theft 83
Love Poem: A Nocturne 91
Gesture with Both Hands Tied 92
"You Must Sing to Be Found; When Found, You Must Sing." 93
Rima: Notes and Observations 95
Origin of Glass 97
Notes 101
Acknowledgments 102
About the Author 105
Colophon 108
What People are Saying About This
“I know this book changed me. The book itself knows change, how to change itself, knows so well how transformation—vast essential change which would seem to oppose a self—brings a person ever closer to their truth.” —Brenda Shaughnessy
"In the spirit of Whitman, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo slips in silently to lie down between the bridegroom and the bride, to inhabit many bodies and many souls, between rapture and grief. 'I want everything to touch me.' These are poems that open borders both personal and political, a map of silences and celebrations. 'You called it cutting apart/ I called it song.'" —D. A. Powell
"Federico Garcia Lorca described duende as a struggle, not a thought, and the deep and natural lyricism of Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Cenzontle is a paragon of that struggle, where ‘it’s easy to make honey/from what is beautiful and what is not.’ In this exquisite debut collection, longing twins with inheritance to consider the interiority of nationhood and the legacy of masculinity and exile. Castillo’s finely-honed poems celebrate and reveal the contours of physical and historical intimacies, a feast for the eyes and heart." —Carmen Giménez Smith
Interviews
The overall themes of Cenzontle deal with childbirth / child loss and what it means to be queer while in a heteronormative marriage. Meaning, what does it mean to have the privilege to bring a child into the world—one in which the brown body (especially of immigrants) is questioned and criminalized. Furthermore, what does it mean to not be able to conceive a child? Implicated in this idea of childbirth is the subject questioning his own sexuality. Immigration plays a significant role as it impacts multiple generations and in multifaceted ways. Within this broader theme of immigration, labor, the interview as poetic form, and domestic violence act to provide a nuanced portrait to the more easily accessible “border narrative.” Deep down, these anxieties stem from a self conscious and even diminutive image of identity, an internalized self-loathing. Water plays a significant role through out the book in the theme of drowning, baptism, whereas childbirth plays a major role in intersecting multiple themes around new beginnings and sex. Towards the end, the book challenges the nuclear family, the hetero marriage, the white picket fence, and other remnants of post war white America as the goal for immigrant families. The book ultimately recognizes its own failure—despite searching for a way to exist with someone else, there is not one single mode of relationship—one single mode of being; as such, it recognizes that there is no origin. Furthermore, the book touches on themes of illness and death as related to the immigrant struggle such as pesticide exposure.