Publishers Weekly
12/18/2023
The ruminative fourth collection from Martinez (Museum of the Americas) blends personal narrative and broader social commentary. Rock-and-roll legend Ritchie Valens serves as a symbol in poems that reflect on cultural identity, the transient nature of fame, and the personal influence of music. In “XIX,” Martinez investigates race and assimilation in the music industry, addressing Valens’s fate: “when your producer, Bob Keane, sliced your name in half from Valenzuela to Valens, was he keen to the violence performed (historical, epistemic, psychological, etc.) to sell you?” Factual accounts of Valens’s life allow Martinez to explore the musician’s legacy within its historical context. The title poem explores the American experience using Don McLean’s “American Pie” (tarta americana, in Spanish) as a touchstone. Martinez frequently employs a stylized spelling—“#Amerikkka”—to critique U.S. society, particularly on issues of race, politics, and social justice. Throughout, he highlights the contradictions and complexities of American culture and the importance of critically examining its present-day realities. These intellectually stimulating and emotionally evocative poems reward careful reflection. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
Advance praise for Tarta Americana:
“Martinez’s latest collection uses the figure of Ritchie Valens, the legendary Mexican-American recording artist, to unspool a knotted personal history, including chemical and erotic utopias and dystopias and the journey to writing about, from, and within neurodiversity . . . Those remediations are intimately expansive genealogies of a personal and collective wound but they are also explorations of neurodivergent form, understood as animated by radically synaesthetic ways of knowing.” —Intervenxions, The Latinx Project at New York University
“A playfully kaleidoscopic collection that focuses on Ritchie Valens, the Chicano rock legend of the 1950s . . . Another superlative entry in this poet's record.” —Booklist (Starred Review)
“J. Michael Martinez’s expanding oeuvre so often investigates and overturns the high and low mythologies of the intersection between Latinidad and U.S. imperialisms: in Tarta Americana, Martinez brings this analysis home and into the intimate space of fandom, queer desire and inscription. This book is Gen X ecstatic in its ambitious formal range and showcases Martinez’s love affair with the sublimity of language at all its registers. Tarta takes us into “You language,” as a discourse meant to deliver us more deeply into a new form of lyric autohistoria-teoria in what is Martinez’s best work yet.” —Carmen Giménez
“For too long, literary critics have explained Hispanic American literature as concerned mainly with “hybridity.” But the extreme warping of our political landscape demands the discovery and harnessing of new cultural properties. Enter the master of multi-perspectival narrative. J. Michael Martinez has constructed an epic…Tarta Americana is not only a riveting poetic-biopic of Richie Valens, but a way of understanding culture-making itself.” —Rodrigo Toscano
“In Tarta Americana, the celluloid and actual Ritchie Valens serve Martinez as body double and secret sharer, the shape-shifting persona who walks us through the cloaca of the political present and media sphere, through our unlived life in the industries of desire. Ritchie Valens’ ‘We Belong Together’ in the key of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Ritchie Valens as Rilkean angel and Orphic repository. Ritchie Valens as the recipient of a centerpiece epistolary sequence that further proliferates into many-sided embodiments ever larger than life—the ‘story-shape’ exuberant and relentless in Martinez’ quest to integrate what was broken or torn apart. The sonic register spans from the caustic vision of Mexican folk balladry with its existential vacilada to the custodies of ixiptla as presence and making present, and the maximalist cascade of ‘one more nonlinear, / sweat stained star- / lit night pulsing / police lights / across the rain streaked / windshield where our most furious / apprehensions / blur all Rothko red . . . y arriba y arriba.” —Roberto Tejada
“’Flying guitar, what we knew is you flew,’ says the speaker in J. Michael Martinez’s dazzling, book-length, riff—code-switched—of Don McLean’s iconic song, lamenting the day the music died. Yes, Martinez deploys his signature array of formats and linguistic registers, only here his focus is one Richard Valenzuela AKA Ritchie Valens—a brilliant epistolary lens, through which the poet offers his most personal and vulnerable poemario to date…we are movingly persuaded when, in the end, the poet says: ‘These pages /are my hands, / you’re holding / my hands.’” —Francisco Aragón
“Ravenous, cinematic, lost to angsty doldrums of rollerblading ‘past Hollywood Video's rows/of Styrofoam VHS dreams’— this is Tarta Americana, a love letter. Martinez craves a deeper connection, past the iconography of a talent who died tragically and too young: the further Martinez ‘scrapes the narrative’ from his own skin, the more something more intimate than the myth of a man emerges, something ‘outside time, ear into the soft, it is this emptiness I want: our sacred outside existing only in each other.’” —Rosebud Ben-Oni
“Richie Valens, immortalized for La Bomba and Donna, dead at 17 in a plane accident, is here both patron saint and proxy-self, and Tarta Americana is both bildungsroman and protest song, a story of family and love, of the pain of growing up, and wide-eyed witness to the casual racism that culminates in cruel violence. In poems that pulse with a lyricism so bright is borders on the technicolor, this gifted poet gives to us what poetry and song have given him: ‘twin consolations to the noise.’” —Dan Beachy-Quick
