{"id":2332,"date":"2021-05-03T10:00:13","date_gmt":"2021-05-03T14:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.spanglishvoces.com\/?p=2332"},"modified":"2021-05-03T10:02:40","modified_gmt":"2021-05-03T14:02:40","slug":"a-review-of-roberto-carlos-garcias-elegies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spanglishvoces.com\/index.php\/2021\/05\/03\/a-review-of-roberto-carlos-garcias-elegies\/","title":{"rendered":"A REVIEW OF ROBERTO CARLOS GARCIA’S [ELEGIES]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cMami, I\u2019ve stolen a word & and it\u2019s brought me closer<\/span><\/p>\n

to you\u2014\u2026\u201d A Review of Roberto Carlos Garcia\u2019s [Elegies]<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Unapologetically vulnerable and intimate, [Elegies]<\/em>, Roberto Carlos Garcia\u2019s third release, peels back the layers of language and culture to thread a story of love, loss, and grief. Brilliant in its evocativeness, urgency, and penmanship, the compilation of lyrical elegies unwraps with nuance and complexity and gifts us with the necessary conversation of what love is\/can be for a Black boy\/man.<\/span><\/p>\n

When Garcia dropped [Elegies]<\/em>, December 2020, we were deep into the pandemic, death was expressed in numbers and we lost track of the people behind those numbers. The whole world felt like a morgue. I let the book sit on my coffee table, and told myself, \u201cI\u2019ll read it tomorrow.\u201d Then I sobbed every time I picked it up at stared at the cover, a collage of his beloveds\u2014 people, places, objects, past selves\u2014, a living archive, an altar. The cover of [Elegies]<\/em> is its own story; vibrant, enchanting, all the while crushing. A prelude of sorts. Before you even open the book, there he is, Black boy\/man, his love\/loss, his joy\/grief. Un museo de recuerdos and history. On brand for Garcia to make such an entrance (see the cover for his second poetry collection, black\/Maybe: An Afro Lyric<\/em>).<\/span><\/p>\n

The title, contained inside brackets, creates a feeling of entrapment and desasosiego. A metaphor that echoes itself into despair. This choice is deliberate and poignant. On a recent interview for The Rumpus<\/em>, Garcia talks about this decision, \u201c…visually, I like the representation of trying to contain grief. Containing grief is something I tried to do by using traditional and nontraditional forms.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This shit is genius and rejects simplicity. Brackets as an aside showing the way grief is always interrupting us, is unavoidable and everywhere, the way grief is also a trap. Garcia writes grief with piercing precision, avoiding waste, and using poetry to carve out the experience in a clear voice. A voice that shifts between devastation and joy, and often even marries the two. And isn\u2019t grief just that? Un hurac\u00e1n de sentimientos encontrados.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWasup macho-man? You good hombre?<\/em>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In its most tender moments, [Elegies]<\/em> introduces us to Mami, the source of Garcia\u2019s elegiac love and muse. Su amor del negrito. These lines from Willie Perdomo\u2019s poem, \u201cUnemployed Mami,\u201d infused in Garcia\u2019s mixtape form resonate, \u201cEven though she don\u2019t have a job, Mami still\/ works hard. The last 23 years of her life have been\/ spent teaching a poet & killing generations\/ of cockroaches with sky-blue plastic slippers.\u201d The remnants of Mami\u2019s life and death are the backbone of the book. Yet, within this intimacy, we find our own stories: our abuelitas\u2019 beehives and big city dreams, our hoods and our corners, the rent-controlled apartments our mothers turned into homes, where they loved us \u201cwith the same love they received, or hopefully\/ better.\u201d\u00a0 In Garcia\u2019s matriarchal upbringing, he learned about manhood from the women around him and the echoes of the men that left them. We embark on this journey in poems like \u201cTo a Young Man on His First Period\u201d, where a boy\/man learns how to bleed, and \u201cElegy for my Pop\u201d, where we witness that boy\/man extend the forgiveness he was never asked for. In each elegy, Garcia decolonizes Western models of love like the nuclear family and patriarchal toxic masculinity. In each elegy, Garcia reveals the tender sorrow of a Black man\/boy in the face of heartbreak and loss.<\/span><\/p>\n

I love the spaces where book plays with the quotidian and delicately details the pieces that make the poet. Garcia pulls poetry from quiet moments that escape us, from the hours we cannot keep, but still tick on our clocks. Those small moments that often come back to our palates; their bitter nostalgia or sweet saudade. As a storyteller, Garcia, is not afraid of difficult love, unthreading his subjects to show their humanity. In \u201cElegy for Bill Withers,\u201d for example, he smoothly elegizes Bill Withers\u2019 legend, a painful post break-up debris, and the saving grace of weekend visitations with his daughter. There is something soul-warming about honoring our small battles\u2014wins and losses, something validating about naming them.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole world is grieving & I think only of your death.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet, [Elegies]<\/em> goes beyond this intimacy. Roberto pulls us into our collective experience of grief and fear as Black people. In the book\u2019s lone prose offering, \u201c10 Minutes of Terror,\u201d Garcia recounts a traffic stop that is anything but routine. He writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"

Roberto Carlos Garc\u00eda<\/p><\/div>\n

“I drove on, my mind running through possible scenarios: will he make a U-turn and come at me full speed, is he calling in other cars to cut me off up ahead, should I speed up and put as much distance between us as possible.”<\/span><\/p>\n

I too replay countless scenarios in my head when I feel or see police presence. In all of\u00a0 those scenarios, no matter how many times I reimagine them, I end up dead. In all of those scenarios no one is held accountable for taking my life. Garcia is keenly aware of himself and the ways in which his Black boy\/man body occupies space. His writing centers on his Negritude and its implications. [Elegies]<\/em> is a timely rendition of our collective mourning during a pandemic to which we, Black people, are especially vulnerable. In [Elegies]<\/em> my own loss finds a mirror. There is nuance in elegizing our ancestors, our icons, our journeys, our survival, our beloveds, our past selves. Grief is not just personal, but political. It is an act of resistance where elegy turns into ode and ode becomes a celebration.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI come from a people who remember such things who tell<\/span><\/p>\n

stories inside the stories we are told. And, so do you.<\/span><\/p>\n

And that\u2019s word, word to everything I love.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In [Elegies], <\/em>Roberto introduces us to the mixtape, a poetic form that cracks the cento wide open\u00a0 by introducing lines from fiction, nonfiction, rap lyrics, and other forms of literature. The form evinces Garcia\u2019s cultural, linguistic and literary m\u00e9lange. It breaks the euro-centric restraints of the cento by recognizing and introducing the literary richness of Black popular culture. It allows room for Garcia to celebrate his vernacular languages and flaunt his poetic artistry. The mixtape poems pulse with music on every line. Each poem introduces a new melody, a new sound, a new beat. Each poem opens a new vista, a new perspective for the reader to connect to. It is dope to see how Garcia reimagines lines by icons like Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar and is able to deliver them with renewed energy. The form is an ode to 90\u2019s hip-hop\u2019s mixtape culture. It evokes a sense of nostalgia and I travel back to 1994. I am holding a yellow walk-man el primo Rainy brought from Los Paises and he is teaching me how to rewind and fast-forward to where the beat drops. The mixtape is a masterful way to bring the cento to the hood.<\/span><\/p>\n

[Elegies] <\/em>finds me on the couch, living through the second season of a pandemic that has taken as much as it has given. I scout online for vaccine appointments for Mam\u00e1. I worry about Mami\u2019s Covid exposure at her hospital job. I call home every other day and text every morning. I even started calling Papi and mis hermanos from that side. I am scared, but love and life keep happening around me. I look out the window at the crack house on the corner where every day lovers find love against all odds. Here, [Elegies]<\/em> is love, and what love can be after love. Here, [Elegies] <\/em>is medicine; un unguento, vivapor\u00fa para el alma.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cLove\u2014through the gentle pain of experience,<\/span><\/p>\n

because birds never ask is this song <\/em>rivers<\/span><\/p>\n

never ask is the ocean this way.<\/em>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"Ser \u00c1lida is a Queer Afro-Dominican writer and educator living in Jackson, Mississippi. Her work dissects ideas of identity\u2014blackness, queerness, womanhood, Dominicanidad, and language. In 2018, an early edit of her poem diary of a mad black woman: Inaugural Address 2016 was a finalist for the ACLU of Mississippi Fight for Freedom competition. A lover of Black people and malec\u00f3n sunsets, when she\u2019s not teaching, she\u2019s most commonly found daydreaming about Bachata, romo and colmad\u00f3n Sundays. She is a 2021-2024 MFA Candidate in Fiction at the University of Mississippi.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cMami, I\u2019ve stolen a word & and it\u2019s brought me closer to you\u2014\u2026\u201d A Review of Roberto Carlos Garcia\u2019s [Elegies] Unapologetically vulnerable and intimate, [Elegies], Roberto Carlos Garcia\u2019s third release, peels back the layers of language and culture to thread a story of love, loss, and grief. Brilliant in its evocativeness, urgency, and penmanship, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":2333,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[78,79],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nA REVIEW OF ROBERTO CARLOS GARCIA'S [ELEGIES] - Spanglish Voces Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.spanglishvoces.com\/index.php\/2021\/05\/03\/a-review-of-roberto-carlos-garcias-elegies\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A REVIEW OF ROBERTO CARLOS GARCIA'S [ELEGIES] - Spanglish Voces Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cMami, I\u2019ve stolen a word & and it\u2019s brought me closer to you\u2014\u2026\u201d A Review of Roberto Carlos Garcia\u2019s [Elegies] Unapologetically vulnerable and intimate, [Elegies], Roberto Carlos Garcia\u2019s third release, peels back the layers of language and culture to thread a story of love, loss, and grief. 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