Gimenez Smith is using form in various and interesting ways and all her poems pulse with questions about the world we live in and what is wrong with it.
She's good at capturing the inbetweenness of multiple and intersecting identities and how we live in this strange world where there is hate and exploitation, plus there are some excellent anticapitalist politics.
She takes a wonderful and strong backboned stance against everything wrong with the world and does so with beautiful language, Incandescent. “in another simultaneity / the end is corporate” from the title poem, a long sequence that is both speculative scifi and prescient wholly realistic, full of lamentation and indignation.
Possible futures abound: likely maybe terrifying absolutely, The role of the poet, both useless and necessary, This collection was interesting. I really liked some poems, especially those dealing with her mother's Alzheimer's disease and modern American consumerism,
In the bulk of these poems, the author just seems angry, Angry at her parents' expectations, at all of the white people around her, at how people treat her, at the US and Americans even though she is American and has been since birth, though if I understand correctly she does not agree, at everyone not Latinx, at the American expectation of women to have no/blonde body hair yet she uses Madonna as an example of a woman with dark body hair, but being half Italian she is just another white woman.
Basically, she just seems very very angry, But is that who she is all of the time, or is that what
she was trying to explore in this collection Is this her anger about how her mother, a Peruvian immigrant, did not get to enjoy the fruits of her labor in this country, instead getting this horrible disease I have no idea.
I have a couple other books of hers, and if I get to them before they are due I may have a better idea,
Alsothe author attended San Jose State, probably at the same time my brother was there, Read this crossdays. The titular poem is an epic that moves through scales, forms, and voices to create a piece that polyphonically resonates across spacetime, Favorite lines,
"I've learned most from the cracked
Once I broke into pieces
Now I break into wholes,
'Be Recorder',This is the first collection by Giménez Smith that I have read, and I picked it up based on the “National Book Award Finalist” stickerI have often enjoyed the finalists more than the collections that ended up winning this particular prize.
In this case, I wasnt such a fan, There are range of formslong lines, short lines, prose pieces, poems written in shapes, Unsurprisingly because it comprises the majority of the book, the Be Recorder sequence had what I thought were the best pieces, Those poems have no punctuation and, honestly, I think would sound awesome to hear them read out loud, I kept having to make my eyes slow down, because they just wanted to keep going past where periods would I imagine typically be, The piece that closes the Be Recorder section is probably my favorite piece in the book,
I felt like this collection is a hammer, very didactic in tone, And its not like things are being said that I dont agree with, but its a lot, But, we are in and were in ina really charged moment, Still, personally, I would have enjoyed more of “her disease had no true beginning, only a gradual peeling away / until she was left a live wire of disquiet” Beasts.
Flipping back through, I underlined many really cool lines or groups, but didnt feel as blown away by so many entire poems, As I said above, I think my opinion of a live reading would be super positivethe frenetic energy I felt would probably come across more clearly,
I'm doing well here with finalists for theNational Book Awards, For poetry, that is. The other two I've read are The Tradition Jericho Brown and Deaf Republic Ilya Kaminsky, Please don't ask about the fiction and nonfiction finalists, however, The only fiction one I've read I abandoned Black Leopard, Red Wolf, and the nonfiction titles were all strangers in the night to me,
Back to Be Recorder, Comprised of three sections, the book tackles more than a body'd expect: motherhood, daughterhood, race, popular culture, feminism, violence, vanity, and yes, Star Wars, What looks like poetic overload for a poet, Giménez Smith pulls off with aplomb,
Me, I liked the more traditional poems of Part One: "Creation Myth," particularly the opening poem "Origins," which speaks to identity, and the third, "Boy Crazy," wherein the speaker wishes for the nighttime freedom boys enjoyed over girls.
Part Two is the title poem, stretching out acrosspages, Ambitious. Resistant. Rebellious. Yet troubled by doubts.
Part Three, "Birthright," returns to shorter poems, including the exploration of her mother's decline to Alzheimer's, a regrettable muse that inspired Rebecca Solnit, too, in some essays I recently read.
Overall, some solid moments, Were I to judge from the three, I'd give it to Deaf Republic, but no judge in his right mind judges before reading the entire list.
And so, two to go,.stars
I have a feeling this is very much one of those "it's not you, it's me" situations, This collection just didn't really work for me, I understood the themes Giménez Smith was trying to evoke, but sometimes things got lost in the details, Her sortof brusque language also wasn't connecting with me, I did think the first section was pretty strong, but when I got to the long poem I found my attention wandering because of the repetitiveness, I would have condensed it, personally, I appreciated the commentary on capitalism in these poems, I guess this collection just isn't what I'm looking for from poetry right now, Be Recorder is a collection of poems about contemporary America, consumerism/capitalism, and what its like being the child of Latin American immigrants in America, Great form and use of language, One of my favorites from the shortlist, there are some power hitters in here and likely that just means I need to revisit but unfortunately a lot of these poems did not remain with me This is the fourth of thefinalists for last year's National Book Award for poetry that I have completed.
Rating:.
If nothing else, this collection is impressive in it's velocity and ambition, Clearly a lot of people like it more that I did and I realize I may piss them off with some of my reactions, but there is a lot to admire here as well.
Gimenez Smith's very autobiographical poems are strongly informed by her Latinx experience and the racial crisis of our current times provides much inspiration, Be Recorder has an awesome mythical etching cover design that appropriately reflect its dense overlaying of ideas and sources, The collection is divided into three sections, each with a distinctly different style and/or theme,
The first section is called "Creation Myth", starting with a poem called "Origins", then touching on a variety of topics we assume are central to the poet.
Right away we are introduced to Gimenez Smith's scattershot, free associating poems, that read more like prose with several poems formatted in regular paragraphs rather than verses, Although they touch upon dozens of important issues, I struggled here to connect to a driving idea and to find the mindset or voice of these poems, The last two poems of this section began to bring things together for me: "No Apology: A Poemifesto" a meditation on being a woman who apologizes for nearly everything and commits to changing the word when it comes into her throat "into a seed to plant in another woman's aura as love.
I only ask that we get started, This is our first step toward world domination, " Then, "Flat Earth Dream Soliloquy" seems to embrace the philosophy of the Flat Earth theory not as fact, but as an approach that can provide new answers to life's problems.
The second section, "Be Recorder", is one long piece made up ofindividual poems, I had a tough time with this section, The free associating shifts are so fast with nearly every line that I found it pretty exhausting to get through, At times it was like being stuck on a public train with someone suffering from schizophrenia giving you a blow by blow account of what they think and see.
In my experience of encountering these situations, there are often brilliant and beautiful and true points that get expressed before the person shifts into a new thought, as do the poems in this section.
On the other hand, it occurred to me that these poems reminded me of something more grounded freestyle rapping, I can imagine that it could be thrilling to hear these poems performed with the energy they seem to have been written in,
As I finished "Be Recorder", I found myself planning to speed through the final section, called "Birthright", However, this is where the payoff was for me, Here the poet ties her themes into reflections of her relationship with family and how they connect to the poems that came before, We learn about her parents and the beginning of surrender to their influence on who she has become, Confrontations with decay and mortality kick in with "As Body II" which opens with "The soul needs no selfreference, . . " In "Beasts" we learn that her mother has some form of severe dementia that she struggles, along with her siblings, to come to terms with "And we made a cabal of medieval scholars speculating how many splinters of light made up her core, how much we might harvest before she disappears.
"
"American Mythos" is long, beautiful meditation, which builds on references to Star Wars, as she tried to understand why she has lied to her own son over a trivial thing.
The tender, longing "Only a Shadow" hits deep with the relationship with her daughter and it brings her face to face with the temporal nature of that relationship and, well, everything else: "My daughter is now the pulse I toss into the wind with the seeds, Particles of us pass over like whispers through the cosmos, upon the clatter the wind makes.
"
There are many jewels to be found in this collection but you're going to have to work for them,
.