A Review of Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole by Ingrid M. Calderón-Collins

Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole by L.A. poet Ingrid M. Calderón-Collins, comes at you raw, unapologetic, heavy. From the first three lines of this poetic memoir, you know she’s going to be honest. This is her immigrant story and as she makes clear, she is in control of her own narrative.

I am 40,
I have saggy tits, white pubes and a story
to tell…

It’s evident Calderón-Collins will tell the reader the truth about herself, the entire truth, as she’s “lied my way through life not only/to others, but also mostly to myself.” This is in the untitled Introduction where she explains the essential reason for writing the book, for replacing the harmful “magick,” of making and portraying herself as someone she’s not, to a healthy, honest, truthful “magick,” “a magick that loved me back,” to make clear that her trauma did happen, that it’s not dismissible and to make clear the recursive process she uses to build a healthy life to avoid the setbacks trauma brings.

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Ingrid M. Calderón-Collins was born in El Salvador in 1979, at the outbreak of the civil war between the government and a coalition of left-wing military groups. It was a time of unrest and violence, prompted by socioeconomic inequality, where “men/[walked] around/in dirty green uniforms,” where “I’d hear shots go off.” At the same time she fought her own personal war, the kind she said that, “lived/in dark houses.” The sexual abuse began at age four when Don Chepe and his wife were left in charge.

“It started with a kiss,” and ended with, “his cock/in me.” At four, this was the prevalent war in Calderón-Collins life, not some adult conflict over important adult issues she was too young to understand and played out at a remove from her immediate world.

The opening section after the introduction is written in a verse that draws the reader in and builds. Information is revealed gradually, in the same way people learn about themselves. On one page Calderón-Collins writes:

cracked hands scratch
the softness
of her thighs—
he is gentle, a giant

Then, two pages later she reveals who “he” is—Don Chepe. But how and why was he able to molest her? On another page it’s reveled he was left in charge of her, like a babysitter. The pieces of her life begin to fall into messy place; what kind of world she was born into and the consequences from living in that world. And from the gradual reveal of information, Calderón-Collins deftly illustrates the lingering effects/consequences of her trauma, from Don Chepe and others, and how she carries it with her throughout her life. Even in many of her word choices, such as “scratch the softness” that enables the discomfort, the PTSD flashbacks, the self-hate, to resonate and linger in the full effect of their seeming contradictions, works towards developing an honest portrayal of how disorienting and disorganizing trauma is to get a hold of, in order to have any clear understanding of who one is, what life is, what a person deserves and how to be a functional human being.

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When Calderón-Collins immigrates to the United States with her parents at age six, and when she’s older, after being deported back to El Salvador, Los Ángeles, the city of immigrants, becomes her home. As a city of contradictions—its natural beauty and the ingrained racism that tinges the residents socio-cultural interactions—it mirrors who she is and welcomes her as is. Being told she’s special as she’s being molested. The city hints at what the second half of the book is about—healing.

It’s here in the suburb of El Monte that she first learns beauty is possible. But it’s a certain kind of beauty. “[H]uge trees and the huge yard…and love is only something for the/pretty girls, the white girls” because it’s “a quiet, perverted city…where a certain type of/immigrant lived/where we lived, this certain type of immigrant.” Quiet, assimilationist. Where Calderón-Collins language shines when she repeats, but rearranges, the two lines about “a certain type of immigrant,” giving this idea new meaning and depth. She rearranges lines several other times with the same success. However, this L.A. flies in the face that certain neighborhoods remind her of the familiar, comforting cultural aspects of El Salvador.

For many different reasons Los Ángeles has always played out as a contradiction, especially for the people who call it home.

Yet, at times, her use of language falters. Her constructions can be awkward, such as “[a] caring tongue burn” when sipping hot chocolate and discussing hypocrisy. Here, Calderón-Collins is again constructing a contradictory image, but instead, when read, it sounds as if the reader stumbles over the language, the flow and rhythm of the verse. However, such occurrences are minor, only briefly taking away from the new and deeper meanings she’s crafting and the comprehension of the poetic narrative.

Calderón-Collins’ healing truly begins when she crafts the image of rebirth, resets her narrative, two-thirds through. “[O]nce upon a time on a warm 9th day,” she begins, now taking active control of her narrative, of her life. Taking control, she reminds the reader and herself, is difficult because “abuse tinges everything.” No interaction is “normal.”

Her true work of understanding herself, from this point to the end, is powerful because her need for it is palpable and her use of language sorts through all the messiness and contradictions in pieces and steps. Gaining confidence from reminding herself that she does deserve the basics of a healthy life: real love by herself and others, the calm of home, of knowing who she is, not what the world says she is.

Calderón-Collins is creating her new “magick.”

Yet, Let the Buzzards Eat Me Whole needs to be longer. What would help this “magick” linger, both the old and new, is by inhabiting more of the specifics of her life she already includes, to feel and understand how they shaped, sustained or altered her. Most importantly, Felix Serria Montoya, an El Monte neighbor she calls “a saint,” and “the first man who treated me like/the child I was,” needs to exist in more than one brief section. Don Chepe’s impact lingers, but in what ways does Montoya’s? How, exactly, did he help her survive?

However, Calderón-Collins did more than survive, as a woman, as an immigrant, but most of all, as a human. What so many in L.A. have always done. And by telling her story unapologetically, Calderón-Collins emerges as a complete three-dimensional person. Someone who thrives.

Holding America Accountable: be/trouble by bridgette bianca

Poet bridgette bianca wants you to know about black people. About black women. About herself. She wants you to understand that their lives are always in danger; that they ready themselves with armor for what the day will throw at them, how amazing; how “bad” they truly are.

In doing so bianca breaks up her debut collection, be/trouble, into four sections—“and the living be,” “this much i know is true,” “our fallen” and “ain’t we a dream too”—sprinkling in their amazingness between all the pain and violence and death they experience every day. bianca breaks her collection into helpful sections, not to make the poems easier to understand or easier to take in, but to ensure she, a black woman, is being heard. As such, she makes clear that her audience is white America, as she pushes back against America’s long and continued history of silencing black women, only noticing them when they can comfort—care—for white people during their most difficult times.

In the first poem “at least i can say” bianca opens by giving context for her discussion of black lives saying from personal experience, “i have/always been keenly aware/that i/could die any day” and “i have/always been sure something/was trying/to kill me.” It’s how black lives are lived each and every day. Danger, death, the possibility of it affecting every choice, as she says in “a saturday night,” about driving while black. bianca asks, “what do you do when you see lights in the rearview mirror/what do you do when the siren loops around your throat.” The use of “you” draws in and implicates the reader in this discussion on policing, effectively gives them a moment to reflect on their own experience, to allow bianca to make her point about how her experience, and by extension black peoples, are different from the readers’.

In this context—to ensure she is not spoken for or misunderstood again—breaking the collection up into sections works. Each section heading functions like the best crafted critical thinking questions, especially the first and last. With the first section heading, “and the living be,” how are their lives lived and in what ways? How are they constructed in America?

And the last section “ain’t we a dream too” begs the question, in what way? The dream white America has created to depict black women, in the sense of aren’t they cool, amazing, confident, or in the sense of this is how they conceived themselves to be, something quite amazing. Or,  all three?

bianca’s poems derive their power from their bluntness. For holding the reader accountable. One way she does this is by the use of refrains. She needs to emphasize certain key points about black people and black women, that white America keeps getting wrong or continues to ignore or discredit. The poem “an exasperated black woman said fuck i’ll do it” uses the alternating refrains “this is not a poem” and “this is my life” as their own stanzas following stanzas telling the truth about bianca’s lived life, what she was going through “…the morning after/the election” after she “…recently buried a loved one.” As the title states directly the frustration of always having to explain herself to white America because no one else will, these refrains stress the factual truth bianca relates, of how she always—and black women historically—have to set their needs and feelings aside to comfort white America when their feelings are uncomfortable,  to play the role of mammy. These refrains build in intensity, enwrapping the reader in Bianca’s world, as the words get more pointed.

this is not a poem…

…forgive me for not
holding back your hair
in solidarity

this is my life

So I’m a little busy

She confidently takes the power from the reader, flips and asserts it.

The refrain in this poem also acts as a call and response in the tradition of black and African poetry. And black music like Jazz and Blues. This, along with bianca’s codeswitching within and between poems, from proper educated English to brief instances of black English before switching back, forces English to adapt to her needs, to her ways of making meaning. These meanings are vital, specific and natural to her experiences as in “i’m trying to remember when i started apologizing for my body” when she says “no growth spurt would/puberty me.” Or in the poem “every nigga is a scar,” where bnianca says “and staying black don’t mean/niggas get to ride our backs/to freedom land/we ain’t no mule.”

Through all the danger, bianca is still able to beautifully assert how amazing her people and their culture are. The poem “that good black don’t crack” is an ode beginning “this is a big black greasy poem” unabashed about all facets of the black community from “the way the other dominos on the table/tremble/when somebody yells/gimme fitteen/while slapping bones” to “full of bus rides down south/or better yet car rides/when the air conditioner stops working/halfway through texas.”

However, the directness about who the audience is doesn’t always work. In an era where writers of color are done teaching white America about themselves, doing their work for them, when people of color are expected to do all the work of learning about white America, the directness took some getting used to. It wasn’t until I read “an exasperated black woman says fuck i’ll do it” that I started to understand that bianca was using this chance to hold white America accountable. Unfortunately this directness in who bianca is addressing unnecessarily interrupts the poems “the good black don’t crack” and “every nigga is a scar,’ undercutting the context in which the poems are powerfully understood, to create a teachable moment.

In the last section “ain’t we a dream” brings everything discussed in the first three sections to an unforgiving and raw head. bianca writes them through the emotional lens of empowerment. All the personality traits American society teaches black women not to inhabit—loudness, the right to their own feelings, joy, to be noticed, etc.—she inhabits with unabashed confidence. A forceful example is from “a message from uppity negresses” where she asserts at the end, that:

…i want you to know
i am all that
i am too good
i know my place is first
and if you have to ask
i have to confirm
the rumors are true
i am better than you
and you can stay mad

I saw such assertions intensify as be/trouble drew to a close. But once the dust settled, it’s apparent that bianca has pushed forward, moved past the witness of white institutional nonsense. Her loving, unflinching gaze of black lives. The only option that remains, she says, is to hold white America accountable and as she asks the reader in “i want the world to see” “am i making you uncomfortable.”

Los Ángeles at Ground Level: Letters To My City by Mike Sonksen

The poet Mike Sonksen knows more about Los Ángeles than almost anyone. It began when he was a kid, his father and both grandfathers introducing him to the sprawling city by taking him on destination drives. Due to his father’s love of architecture, having, “taught me about…Frank Lloyd Write from an early age,” Sonksen “had a natural interest in maps and geography.” Those drives fostered that interest, dipping in and out of distinctly planned and inhabited neighborhoods that made up the patchwork quilt of, not only the city, but Los Ángeles County.

In Sonksen’s new book Letters To My City (The Accomplices/Writ Large Press, 2019), he explores the city’s geography and architecture from the ground up, from his perspective as a third-generation Angeleño. The book is a collection of his poems and articles that span his 20+ years of exploring, not only the landscapes of Los Ángeles, but the people and cultures and histories of communities like Little Tokyo, The Eastside, Leimert Park and even Cambodia Town in Long Beach.

Early in Letters, Sonksen includes his remembrance of local human interest reporter Huell Howser in, “Huell Howser and the Gospel of Beauty.” Howser hosted “California’s Gold,” on local PBS, highlighting landmarks, small towns, places of interest or events in California that were not well known, including countless in L.A. and Southern California. In each episode Howser conducted impromptu and informal interviews with locals involved with the sites he visited. When the show debuted in 1991, Los Ángeles and California were beginning to take a serious interest in and find significance in its own history. Howser, according to Sonksen, “provided the common ground for people to relate and meet on,” especially in Southern California, where Howser lived, “like he did for my dad, grandmother and me.” Plus, “‘California’s Gold’ reinforced my own burgeoning interest in this history; I saw Huell as a messenger to stick to my own California dream.”

Along with the article, “Community, not a Commodity: The Ethics of Giving a City Tour,” the opening 35 pages or so of Letters To My City act as explanation of Sonksen’s aesthetics and why he tells the stories he does: Get the History Right, Sharing Authority and Debunking Stereotypes and the unofficial, The Right to the City.

The concepts of Mike Sonksen’s aesthetics are apparent throughout Letters To My City. He shares his authority by quoting long time Cambodian residents of Long Beach’s Cambodia Town in “Driving Down the 105,” as a way for them to tell their neighborhood’s history. When he profiles a person, such as the late dynamic Chicana writer from Oxnard, California, Michele Serros, he lets those who knew her personally, speak to who she really was.

When Sonksen entered UCLA in 1992, when native Angeleños like Lynell George, Ruben Martinez and Luis J. Rodriguez were publishing their journalism and narratives about L.A., and he was being taught by urban theorist and native Mike Davis, they helped reinforce his “interest in all things Los Angeles.” He learned about letting a place speak for itself.

However, Sonksen’s articles can leave readers of Letters’ wanting more specific, from-the-ground-up, portrayals of L.A. Too many lack depth in the content he’s exploring, where he ends up repeating himself instead of expanding on his idea(s). A good example is “The Cascades.” Here, language is used more as a summary, and where he needs to expand his ideas, Sonksen repeats information. “We notice on our left side a park with a well-lit hillside waterfall fountain. Quickly I turn left heading towards what looks to be a park.” As the centerpiece of the article, in sentence two, I want to know how this waterfall fountain ads to the neighborhood’s atmosphere.

Another example is when Sonksen says at various times throughout his articles, “as noted/said earlier,” and proceeds to only restate that same sentence as above, before immediately moving on to a new paragraph or point.

Yet, there are many engaging and rich articles that portray L.A. from the lived-in, ground-up perspective Sonksen’s acquired from a lifetime of personally engaging in L.A. Enough for Letters to join the narrative of correction written by native Angeleños, illustrating that Angeleños actually do care about their city, that there is a deep, rich history and [literary] culture there, that there are beautiful neighborhoods—in all definitions of the term—most having nothing to do with Hollywood, some with predominately “humble working-class people.” Sonken quotes Lynell George at one point in Letters, saying, “we know much more, it seems, about ancient cities and dead civilizations…than we do about day-to-day life in ‘South Central Los Angeles’…beyond the trope.”

Sonksen too, goes beyond the tropes, to portray the suburbs in “Something in the Water: Hip-Hop History in Cerrritos.” He quotes DJ Rhettmatic, remembering his childhood in Cerritos in the ‘80s, saying , “…their [his father’s employment’s] old building is actually on Valley…right next to the old Don Juan Mexican restaurant that used to be there on the corner…” His DJ crew, “…used to DJ parties at Don Juan during the early stages before the crew even manifested.” These are details about how culture was created in Cerritos and what kind of culture it was, that is now preserved.

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Letters To My City is most powerful when Sonksen explores what Los Ángeles is and reminds the reader what L.A. has. That’s where he’s at his best, inhabiting the same boundless enthusiasm for his subjects that he saw Huell Howser inhabit for his.

Sonksen writes many list and ode poems, full of local history and culture. In the poem “Ode to L.A. Women Writers,” he reminds readers “L.A. women writers are the masters of this ecology.” He then lists as many as he can, from Wanda Coleman to Octavia E. Butler, to Irene Soriano and Helena Maria Viramontes. In “Homage to Little Tokyo” Sonksen repeats throughout, “Little Tokyo is…” That device creates the sense of community pride that builds throughout the poem as he proceeds to describe the heartbeat of one of L.A.’s most iconic neighborhoods. “Little Tokyo is legacy businesses/Nisei witnesses.” he writes, tightly weaving in the community’s history as context for his sustained focus on the individuals who’ve shaped Little Tokyo.

Although his poems celebrate L.A., Sonksen casts a critical eye on the city’s faults and issues. “I Am Still Alive in Los Angeles!” an update to his most iconic poem “I Am Alive in Los Angeles!” opens Letters and sets the context for how the rest of the book is understood. The poem steeps the city in three of its pressing issues: affordability, traffic and environment. The opening dives right in: “I am alive in Los Angeles/even as the price of rent rises/and gridlock strangles central arteries…” But through it all, Sonksen says, “The community is a poem/in progress called Los Angeles.”

Los Ángeles, and cities in general, are by their very nature imperfect, always in transition to becoming something else, especially at the community level. It’s a city’s communities, Sonksen reminds us, that shape what a city is. And those communities are shaped by the people that live there. Those, he says in the title poem, who “pound the pavement, fight the good fight,” are civically engaged.

Though a fuller portrayal of L.A. would have included more communities in other parts of L.A. (e.g. the Persian community on the Westside or any specific community in the San Fernando Valley), as Letters primarily explores downtown to the east (the Eastside, SGV) and South Central to South L.A. County (Cerritos, Long Beach), it’s the ground-up perspective from which Sonksen portrays each community and tells their history, that creates the mostly intimate portrayal(s) of this often written about and vastly misunderstood city. By the end of Letters To My City it becomes apparent that this perspective is the only authentic way to truly understand Los Ángeles—or any city.

Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut by Vickie Vértiz

Latinx Los Ángeles. One of the main reasons the city is always praised for its diversity. Spanish peppering homes in Bell Gardens and mariachis shooting the breeze as they wait to be hired at Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights.

But pay attention to the media or watch the movies and T.V. shows made by Hollywood, and it’s like the community doesn’t exist. As Chris Rock said in his 2014 Hollywood Reporter article criticizing the industry’s lack of diversity, “You’re in L.A., you’ve got to try not to hire Mexicans.” It’s as if Hollywood refuses to know its own city. A willingness to ignore a community that makes up half the city’s population.

However, Latinx Angeleños, like poet Vickie Vértiz, are increasingly penning their own narratives of a lived life born here in Los Ángeles and of the community they’re from. These writers, most with roots in Mexico and Central America, use their writing to portray their loyalty and love for their community in the context of discussing social issues. This Latinx Angeleño literary tradition took hold in the 1980s, in part due to what L.A. poet Marisela Norte said about her community living on the Eastside of the L.A. River: “I don’t know why things start and stop and matter once they’re safely over that side,” the Westside, “of the bridge.” [1]

That’s why in 1982, the poetry anthology Two Hundred and One: Homenaje a la Ciudad de Los Angeles/The Latino experience in Los Angeles appeared, that focused on these long ignored voices of L.A.’s Latino/a poets. The anthology included such future heavy hitters as former L.A. Poet Laureate Luis Rodriguez, Victor Ville, Marisela Norte and Helena Maria Viramontes. [2]

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Vickie Vértiz’s second poetry collection Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut (University of Arizona Press), sidesteps the glare of Hollywood and vividly focuses on her community of working class Latinxs in Southeast Los Ángeles. At the outset, the first poem “Already My Lips Were Luminous,” places the reader directly into her family and community with Amá and her uncle whose “breath is two cases of cigarettes and one/aluminum beer.” Where “Amá throws/up two dollar wine/after a pool party.” This place is where “the songs of crows/outside unspool.” However, Southeast Los Ángeles is more than just the stereotypical working class Latinx. Vértiz tells the reader not only that “my first kiss is with an uncle/comforting.” but that:

When his sons leave for the Persian Gulf  he kisses them too   and
I’m                  confused
because men never embrace around me…
I understand, then                there must be other ways to love
your children

This is what Vértiz’s collection explores, the different ways to love a person or community. One of the most personal and prevalent ways she explores, Vértiz learned from her father. She explained in an interview that “my relationship to home is…the way my father related to the family he made with my mom…that I could leave, and I should leave, and I could always come back.”[3] And in Palm Frond she periodically leaves Southeast L.A., at one point, the outset of part two, traveling to Paris and Mexico. But when Vértiz returns home, her poems retain that intimacy and socio-critical eye that illustrates that her community matters and that it matters in/to L.A., while retaining the love and empathy of a place that will always be a part of her.

In the persona poem “Don Mario” she says:

One bedroom in the city of crowded…
covered in finger filth…
In the living room, darting bullets in the dark…
Mario dreams of driving
his plump neighbor on her errands
: church first, the 99 Cent Store
Bursting with school kids

Vértiz does a powerful job of allowing the reader to experience her Southeast L.A. community through her and her fellow Latinxs as individuals, employing precise line breaks. These breaks create multiple contextualized levels of meaning, like ending with “driving” in the above poem. That evokes open freedom and possibilities before cementing Mario’s dream into a more realistic and plausible one, shaped by Mario’s reality and circumstances. Circumstances born out of a long history of neglect that Vértiz understands all too well.

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Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut also expands on Los Ángeles’ Latinx literary tradition of documentation, of giving a “historical and cultural consciousness” to a community,[4]by Vértiz including her own queer Latinx identity. This is one of those other ways to love that she tactfully alludes to in “Already My Lips Were Luminous.”

In the poem “Portrait as a Deer Hunter” Vértiz places her Latinx queerness, by again using history, in the struggle for LGBTQIA rights, including an epigraph about the famous Stonewall incident in New York. But it’s her ability, as she says in “Lover’s Letter,” “To be untranslatable” that infuses many of these poems with her compassion and certainty, that creates a refreshing queerness that’s definitely her own. Vértiz says at one point, “Today is more like summer in South Gate or/Bed-Stuy.” This is the regular everydayness of being a queer Latinx, the unnoticed and unrecorded parts of these lives that occur once the media has left.

Vértiz skillfully captures this “untranslatability” because she understands how to adeptly use poetic lines. She creates extra spaces within a line to capture the extra meanings and layers of her queerness with a verve and sincerity that lacks the typical insecurity that accompanies such a self-discovery and portrayal. These extra spaces cause these otherwise easily accessible poems to strategically pause, powerfully allowing the reader to notice and feel the extra complexities of the love and affection she has to navigate through.

As Vickie Vértiz says in the final poem, about her language—these poems—they are “My resist.” In the Latinx Angeleño literary tradition she vibrantly expands on, and brings thought provoking light to, her Southeast L.A. community. And when readers step away, a part of that light lingers inside them.

Notes

[1] Rachmuhl, Sophie. A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, 1950-1990. Otis Books/Seismcity Editions, 2015.

[2] Rachmuhl, Sophie. A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, 1950-1990. Otis Books/Seismcity Editions, 2015.

[3] Membreno, Soraya. “Fierce As Fuck: The Future of Poetry Is Brown & Queer.”Bitchmedia.org, Bitch Media, 6 Oct. 2017, 9:22am.

[4]Rachmuhl, Sophie. A Higher Form of Politics: The Rise of a Poetry Scene, 1950-1990. Otis Books/Seismcity Editions, 2015.