Virgin Poems

Review by New York Times Review

The Virgin Mary, and physical virginity, are largely absent from Sotelo's debut. In a book much about young Latina sexuality, and who constructs and controls it, what's not present is as relevant as what is. In "Do You Speak Virgin?" Sotelo's speaker, at a wedding with her husband, describes herself as an accessory: "I am a Mexican American fascinator" with "a bouquet of cacti wilting in my hand." Some pissed-off virgins "are here to prove a point." A man flees "once he sees how far & wide, / how dark & deep / this frigid female mind can go." This is socio-emotional correlative more than anecdotal narrative. Myths also provide models. "When a man tells you he's a monster, / believe him," begins one of several poems in the voice of Ariadne. Sotelo's poems tend to blend together, partly thanks to her fondness for I-statements. ("People think I'm sweet... I try the ancho chile pork ribs ... I'm hungry & confused.") Paradoxically, self disappears behind self-reference, and "I" has a blurring effect, as if we're driving too fast through a landscape to take much in. But Sotelo's best poems are also first person. Narrative fragment and commentary circle specific memory in "Trauma With a Second Chance at Humiliation": "You remind me of a man I knew at sixteen. / Every afternoon, / I climbed the stairs to see him." Slowing down, she relays experience without evasive disjunction or false coherence. Sotelo's complicated ambivalence about men who "still love girls, but rarely admit it" is disturbing and authentic.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 8, 2018]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Despite the coyly turned woman on the cover, the first poem in this incisive collection is bold, baldly declaring, I'm not afraid of sex. / I'm afraid of his skeleton / knocking against the headboard / in the middle of the night. A few poems later comes the thesis: We're all performing our bruises. Indeed, this is a collection that finds the wounds of childhood and new adulthood and presses on them. It's less about womanhood and virginity and more about how they are weighed in society. See how an object can change / when a new person wants it, writes Sotelo, a self-proclaimed Mexican American fascinator, as she traverses these ideas in poems that are wry, caustic, and often wounded. There are echoes of Sylvia Plath in her odes to a hard and absent father, in her reflections on family history, and in her repeated explorations of the Minotaur myth. Brutal in execution but with a bitingly humorous undercurrent, this collection lays bare an image of femininity in our society, even as Sotelo keeps some things close to the chest. It does matter, she writes. I don't have to tell you why. --Reagan, Maggie Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Sotelo explores the power of mythologizing personal history in her striking debut, winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize. The collection is divided into seven sections-Taste, Revelation, Humiliation, Pastoral, Myth, Parable, and Rest Cure-and from the start Sotelo cultivates intimacy through moments of vulnerability. For example, in "Summer Barbecue with Two Men," she writes, "Tonight, the moon looks like Billie Holiday, trembling/ because there are problems other people have/ & now I have them, too." Each section is loosely themed; for example, in "Humiliation," Sotelo deals with shame in a variety of situations, while the poems in "Pastoral" revolve around issues with a father figure. Familiar figures from Greek myths-namely Persephone, Ariadne, and Theseus- are recurring symbols that serve as a means to probe the darker sides of human behavior. In "Death Wish," Theseus battles suicidal ideation and is later seen "bleeding from/ his head to his hands,/ like Christ without clear cause." In the subsequent poem, he declares, "I'm only good/ at killing what I know, then taking off." The book is also replete with novel images, as when Sotelo describes a heart as "a lake where young geese// go missing, show up bloody// after midnight." With humanity and raw honesty, Sotelo finds fresh ways to approach romance, family, and more. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Stein follows up Rough Honey, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, with more rough love. "If you're going to storm,/ I said/ do it harder" opens the collection, and elsewhere the speaker insists, "What's wrong/ with me is you." Kneading dough hurts like a bruise, bombs fall like flowers of ice, a woman "kneels on her pain," and what of life? "It's all born lost/ and we just fetch it for a little while." Yet if these poems are mordant, they're also rich and sensual and glittering, and Stein delivers some bold aperçus: "the ruin I've made is in one piece," says one poem, and elsewhere "I have a turnstile heart." -VERDICT If Stein wants to spin "to lose my bearings," she wants us to spin, too. Excellent poetry. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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SUMMER BARBECUE WITH TWO MEN Tonight, the moon looks like Billie Holiday, trembling because there are problems other people have & now I have them, too. I'm wearing a cherry-colored cardigan over a navy print dress, on purpose. People think I'm sweet. I try the Ancho chile pork ribs, in case the man I once wanted might still rub off on me. I wonder if I'll ever know about flavors, what tastes right. In the overheated kitchen, I chat briefly with a series of 30-something-year old men--all slender, all bearded, lustful to the point of sullen. I hug & compliment their pretty, female partners as a way of saying, I am beautiful in my harmlessness! Outside, people. A circle of party chairs. I don't care much for a stranger's guacamole. The man I once wanted is grilling these beautiful peaches. He offers some-- I'm embarrassed. I try not to touch his hand. I try to touch his hand. On the porch, another man I know is kissing the shoulder of a woman whose fiancée is here somewhere. Guess what, he says. You're the only one who cares. I wouldn't have guessed: Judgment is a golden habañero margarita with wings, wet & cold on his chest. So many people are tender from the right angle. I'm hungry & confused. I love a good barbecue. Save me. * * * Summer Seminar In this minor emergency of the self, we drink to become confused, to swim in the dark like idiot fish. This is a lake at night in a forest. This is where we look up at the stains in the sky and someone says, It's purpling out here, and someone else says, Someone write that down. We're all performing our bruises. Chloe smiles like a specialty knife, Bea tells stories like a bubbly divorcée, Clara smokes like a sage in her coiffed towel, expertly naked, third eye shining. I hang back on the shore with Kyle. We talk about his man in New York while our skinny-dipping sirens sing show tunes in the violet dark. Later, we're all in a clinic at 3 am handling Kyle's broken ankle. It's so embarrassing, he keeps saying. And it is: earlier, doing the sprinkler in a dorm room to Please Don't Stop the Music, he kept yelling, Stop the Music! Stop the Music! until we understood: he wasn't actually joking. And sometimes the poems were like that. When we wrote knife, bubbly, naked, we were really getting down, dancing hard on the injury. * * * I'm Trying to Write a Poem about a Virgin and It's Awful She was very unhappy and vaguely religious so I put her at the edge of the lake where the ducks were waddling along like Victorian children, living out their lives in blithe, downy softness. She hated her idleness. I loved her resilience. Her ability to turn her gaze on small versions of herself seemed important. The lake wasn't really a lake. It was a state of mind where words like ochre , darken and false were supposed to describe her at her best and worst, but they were only shadows and everyone knows the best shadows always look like the worst kinds of men. She wanted them badly, so I took her for a swim. In the lake that was not a lake, her twenty-five year old body felt the joy of being bare and naïve among the seaweed and tiny neon fish, but I didn't believe her. And I couldn't think of anything to say in her defense. Some people said I should take her out of the poem. Other people said No, take her out of the lake and put her in a bedroom where one man is saying, I can't help you, and another is saying, You waited too long. The men sounded like cynical seabirds. When they said, Virgin , they meant, Version we've left behind . I didn't trust them. So I took her to the rush of the sea. She waded in and waved at me. I turned away. It wasn't her fault. She wasn't the shell I was after. * * * Trauma with a Second Chance at Humiliation You remind me of a man I knew at sixteen. Every afternoon, I climbed the stairs to see him, my copy of The Sound and the Fury clutched to my chest, my hands fluttering with nerves. When he said, She was his whole world , about Caddy's kindness to Benji, I thought How Beautiful, the clocks stilling and the field widening-- his oblong figure behind the tree. I drew eyes in my notebooks that year, wet lashes, dense pupils. Also his figure--slender, awkward, geometric. ~ He liked teasing me and also a few others. But only I read his copy of The Dialogues . As I read, I felt him look. At night, I traced his scribbled notes with my finger. ~ Eight years later, I find a man who resembles him. It's your encyclopedic mind. It's the strangeness of your features. It's the way you hold the burnt sugar to my mouth to taste, then pull it away, eager for my caramelized reaction. ~ Isn't it delicious? There's always going to be someone willing to give a spoonful of their attention. The trick is to recognize the conversation will run out, right into I'm sure we'll run into each other sometime. ~That was in the bookstore, the last time I saw him. Now you are a page I read while holding my breath. I'll turn you into something else, a footnote of a person. Like I was sitting next to you on our friend's couch, your hand on my thigh for several seconds. You said it-- Do you want me to cook for you? as if you could promise that and more. ~ To admit I love you would be to admit I love ideas more than men, myself even less than ideas. The thin line of your mouth, I could have held it down, erased the I didn't mean to make you think so. ~ What you don't say is an iris locked in a container. What I don't say is an iris burning wildly over a pool of water. I want you take yours out. Show it to me, please. See how an object can change when a new person wants it. ~ To divulge is dangerous, but it's also chimerical. One side of me says, Destroy. The other, Be Gentle. Now this pool of water is a platonic eye that avoids attachment by rippling away. These ashen petals: the expectation that you'll understand intuitively what has taken me years to describe. ~ I'm open to ridicule. I can let this go. But just so you know, after school, it was like this: I sat on the desk, we talked and talked. You could say it was nothing, the windows fogged with winter, the trees outside like the shadows of a bad idea going brittle. It does matter. I don't have to tell you why. Excerpted from Virgin: Poems All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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