We Borrowed Gentleness

by J. Estanislao Lopez

Overview

We Borrowed Gentleness interrogates the innateness of pain and forms of destruction—through natural disaster, through God, through family, and through the power structures and patriarchal violence that embeds itself in language and cultural memory. Poems critique and challenge the patriarchal narratives that dominate American history. 

The poems leave the question open of whether man, men, a father and son, are redeemable after the surge of rising white nationalism in America. And yet, there are poems that find, still, bits of joy and perhaps a shred of hope.

By juxtaposing poems of louder narrative imagination with quieter poems that explore intimate failings within a family, often portrayed with a realist aesthetic, the book attempts to work through the essential fault in man, in men—in the structures that they design and maintain.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948579285
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	10/11/2022
Pages:	100
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

J. Estanislao Lopez's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Adroit Journal, Boston Review, BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. His debut collection, We Borrowed Gentleness, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in October 2022. He earned an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and lives in Houston.

Table of Contents

A Metaphor 1

Independence Day in West Texas 5

Little Words 7

The Contract 8

Promise 9

The Politics of Rivers 10

Let's Not Get Carried Away 12

Theodicy Written in the Occupied Sands 13

Diaspora 14

Alternate Ending: Solomon's Misjudgment 15

Laredo Duplex 16

The Offering 17

Patterns 18

A Miracle 20

Elegy in the Absence of Answers 21

My Uncle's Killer 22

Porvenir 23

The New Regime 29

The Framework of an Imaginary Nation 30

Like It Is 31

Alternate Ending: The Unrecorded Bitterness of Abraham 32

Knowing Children 33

Dream of God as a Venture Capitalist 34

Anti-Ode to the Metaphysical 35

The Ghosts of My Past Are in Disrepair 36

Living in the Moment 37

Alternate Ending: The Invention of Science 39

Reasons to Despise Being Literary 40

The Family Endures Magritte's Revisions of La Chambre d'Écoute 41

How to Confront the Past 42

Erik Estrada Defends His Place in the Canon 43

Intelligent Design 44

Erosion 45

-ism 46

False Cognates 49

Speaking Ill of the Dead 50

Elegy with No Tenor 51

Elongations 52

The Vestigial 53

The Untranslatable 54

The Aphids 55

Astrophysics 56

Alternate Ending: The Escape of Jephthah's Daughter 57

Meditation on the Last Prayer 58

The Interval 59

Pastoral 60

A Man's Apology 61

The Word 63

Meditation on Beauty 64

The Burning Field 65

A Force Equal to the Weight of the Fluid Displaced 68

The Maker 73

Alternate Beginning: The Sixth Day 74

Places with Terrible Wi-Fi 75

Static 76

In Praise of Weakness 77

At Last, Surrender 79

Acknowledgments 81

Editorial Reviews

A finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry

“In his compelling debut collection, We Borrowed Gentleness, J. Estanislao Lopez warns against the limits of the language a poet uses… Lopez’s search for meaning widens from family history to the “calcified” American empire, the impending cataclysm of global warming (“Maybe there’s room / in the margin of error for us to save ourselves”), science and metaphysics, and Biblical tales (Genesis, Solomon, Jephthah’s daughter) for which he poses “alternate ending[s]” and beginnings that would prevent them from becoming mere shibboleths. But he returns, with memorable intimacy, to his father’s silent masculinity, finding a poet’s way of nurturing a son, through the fragile posterity of words.”
—David Woo, Harriet Books

“In Lopez’s poems, beauty and suffering are wed, holding vulnerable hands, and sometimes gripping so tight it hurts the bones.”
—Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe

"In these beautiful, deceptively complex poems, J. Estanislao Lopez meditates on anger and love, on the intricacies of metaphor and its failure to address our most urgent concerns. Here, the drama of individual experience—of the everyday, of parents and daughters, of race and nationality—plays against the vast backdrop of history. Here, Lopez considers the forces of injustice and truth, in which beauty and danger co-exist inextricably, over generations. This is a profound and important first book from a poet who is here to stay."
—Kevin Prufer

“The speaker in ‘Theodicy Written in the Occupied Sands’ directs our attention toward ‘an old historian pointing to a wound/convinced it spills not blood, but light.’ Throughout his stunning debut, We Borrowed Gentleness, Lopez writes in the ink of that spilled light, examining lineage—be it historical, political, familial, religious—in order to mediate conflicts between public record and personal memory. With each poem, another hierarchy is destabilized, but with such instability, there is always a grounding force—the natural world. Along with the various emotional registers of this collection, there are also compelling formal properties, as well as an enormous care for language. Ultimately, this is a collection of finding the divine where you would think there would be none.”
—Iliana Rocha

“In We Borrowed Gentleness, J.E. Lopez meditates on the ouroboros of time and its brutal cycles, echoing from father to father through generations. A meditation on masculinity, fatherhood, and memory, these poems weave a gentle web through time and space to suspend the violences within. From how to explain the silence of god and the indifference of the universe to a child in ‘Astrophysics’ (‘Some nights, we read / from her favorite astronomy book. / I struggle to explain the difference / between bodies and dust’) to the thread of consciousness that connects a child's witness to a son's compassion for his father in the face of his sins, this book is grounded in familial intimacy, expressed through the land and its ancestors, its history and creatures. The brilliance of this book is how the voice is always locating itself somewhere between father and son, child and man, husband and what husbands do in the dark, god to child, child to animal. Through this tension, Lopez shows us how power is terrifying to hold, how tender a child's world is, how vulnerable one must be to take the lessons of history, to ‘converse with Time, whose advice never changes. Who only ever says, forget.’”
—Vanessa Angélica Villareal

From the Publisher