‘You will define me and you will be wrong’

Museum of New Mexico Press (2023, 333 pp.)

“I see right now Día de los Muertos speaks/to low rider ghosts/and after sundown/La Llorona left the passenger’s door open/Screaming —howling — haunting/into non-translated winds.”

What comprises a New Mexico poem? Chris Candelario’s “’55 Dodge” marks the opening salvo to this teeming collection and has all the elements: badass busted-up vehicles, ghosts, muddy arroyos and the perennial question: how did you get here?

The three cultures of Native, Hispanic and Anglo merge in a seamless dance around 11 themes: community, culture, family, history, identity, landscape, nature, people, querencia, spirituality and water. Editors (and stellar New Mexico poets in their own right) Levi Romero and Michelle Otero aim for inclusion rather than definition, offering space for “personal interpretations of what it means to be threaded into the cultural fabric of the New Mexican landscape.”

In Ioanna Carlsen’s “Woman on a Trip, Northern New Mexico” (“Culture”), the narrator is driving and driving along deserted stretches of highway, confronted by somewhat surreal images along the way, an old woman walking, “the leg of a dog,” then the piercing rising sun — “in your eyes, fingers of shadow.” She concludes with a shock at the arrival at her destination: “Beside the house/two graves,/mounded earth,/stone marker,/bright plastic flowers.” 

Transplanted from distant lands, the Italian German narrator of María Rinaldi’s “June 17, 2015” forms a passionate response to those who would judge her identity (“Don’t talk to me/the ‘little Gringa girl’/about identity”) and warns: “you will define me/and you/will/be wrong.” Iris Gersh’s “A Single Butterfly” captures fraught moments in the hippie times of Northern New Mexico. Other distinct poems around “culture” include Savannah P. Rodriguez’s “Matanza” and Arthur Sze’s “Farolitos.”

Under “Nature,” a theme so spiritually primordial for poets of this state, Rebecca Aronson delineates in “Forecast” the ferocious wind which “makes a puzzle/of structure; pecan shells/become shrapnel” and gusts “make ghost sounds in the vents.” Taos poet Maria Teresa Garcia in “Los Remedios” (“Remedies”) writes movingly in a bilingual poem how remedies using local plants offer ancient “miracles of nature:” “From the earth come the remedies into the hands of the people./From the wisdom of Chalchiuhtlicue, Aztec goddess of healing.” She adds that it is “one of the traditions the Conquistadores didn’t destroy.” 

A poem about hiking (“Against tenderness, she pictures/her death as a hike gauged Easy.” — A.G.S. Gordon) might be juxtaposed next to a meditation on the bosque (Sheryl Guterl); several takes on the wily coyote (Tani Arness, Reed Bobroff) or Aja Oishi’s whimsical “Animal Tally from the Window of a February Train, Santa Fe to Albuquerque.” There are dozens of diverse voices here, and a multitude of startling experiences. 

Former poet laureate of Santa Fe Valerie Martínez contributes a sprawling origin story of her city, “And They Called It Horizon,” taking the reader literally from a seed in the sierra madre to encompass the nomadic landscape and bustling life we know today: “Cellular, ancestral — bridging now and then.” 

Some of our local notable contributors include Catherine Strisik, Veronica Golos, Ricardo Martínez, Jenny Goldberg and Joshua K. Concha. Coral Dawn Bernal’s “Movement” is a kind of lush metaphorical seesaw of symbiosis: “If you are cups of light/I am spoonfuls of velocity.” And Kate Marco’s “Moons” reminds us “we have begun/to measure/our lives in/moons — /the calendars/have fallen/from/each of our walls.”

The collection concludes suitably with paeans to the acequias, as in Jerry Ortiz y Pino’s lovely dispatch from Dixon, July 5, 2016: “The water’s music — and its power—/Take me; shake me. Unexpected,/They force delight through my heart./ … The beauty of this ancient rite.”

Poets from the New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023 will be reading Saturday, Oct. 28, at 3:30 p.m. at SOMOS literary salon, 108 Civic Plaza Drive, Taos. Go to somostaos.org.