Lima : limón

Review by New York Times Review

DEAR DELINQUENT, by Ann Townsend. (Sarabande, paper, $15.95.) With elegant language and turbulent feeling, this collection tracks the course of desire. "The mind knows when to stand back," Townsend writes. "Part of me / was not for order, but chaos." LIMA :: LIMÓN, by Natalie Scenters-Zapico. (Copper Canyon, paper, $16.) This book, by a poet from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, fixates on liminal zones: national borders, gender roles, the overlap between love and possession. "Isn't that what women do," one poem challenges, "laugh at jokes at their own expense?" HYBRIDA: POEMS, by Tina Chang. (Norton, $26.95.) Drawing on fairy tales, mixed-media visual art and other hybrid forms, Chang evokes the bottomless love and terror of motherhood as she describes raising her mixed-race son: "I know the world will find him / and tell him the history of his skin." SIGHTSEER IN THIS KILLING CITY, by Eugene Gloria. (Penguin Poets, paper, $18.) Jazzy, surreal, neon-lit, Gloria's new poems describe a culture of violence in the Philippines and especially America. The book ends on the image of a sign at a mall: "Karate, Guns & Tanning." AN INFUSION OF VIOLETS, by Nancy Naomi Carlson. (Seagull, paper, $19.) Carlson, who also works as a translator and editor, uses controlled lines and a lyrical voice to plumb the self, often with biblical overtones.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 23, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

In her scintillating second collection, Scenters-Zapico adopts citrus, fruit derived through hybridization, a union of strands so closely related as to be inseparable, as a signifier of duality. With unabashed passion, the poet returns to subjects introduced in her first book, The Verging Cities (2015), further complicating binary notions of language, geography, and gender. In gleaming, evocative verse that combines Spanish and English, the poet interrogates her homelands of the mirror cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso while exploding timeworn notions of masculinity and femininity ("I call my man, Mi reina over & over"). Throughout the book, the violent specter of narcotics trafficking surfaces in visceral imagery ("where / I'm from it's a blessing not to be / a woman gagged by electrical tape / & bound to the hood of a car") and in the irreversible impact on those who have lived this experience ("I learned to read by sounding out the names / in obituaries of those who had died"). A dazzling collection, it punches like spiked limonada; to be read alongside writers like Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and Ángel García.--Diego Báez Copyright 2019 Booklist

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

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Through a range of forms-tercets, prose hybrids, lyric strophes, and more-the poems in Scenters-Zapico's second collection (after The Verging Cities) incisively interrogate the aesthetics of cultural difference. "I want you/ to say my name like the word: lemon./Say it like the word: limón. Undress me/in strands of rind," remarks the speaker in the opening poem. Scenters-Zapico, who grew up on the U.S.-Mexico border, examines this cross-cultural overlap, positing her speaker as being at once self and other, and suggesting the internalized gaze of the predominant culture. She provocatively reveals her speakers as being complicit in their own exotification and objectification, as she implores, "I want to be lemons in the bowl/ on the cover of the magazine." Scenters-Zapico's formal dexterity serves the book's subject, as the instability of the language mirrors and complicates the speaker's self-aware performances of cultural difference. In "My Macho Takes Good Care of Me," she writes: "because he's a citizen de los united estates./ I got a stove this big, a refri this full, a mirror/ just to see my pretty face." Here, the speaker performs gendered tropes of femininity to serve her own material gain. Yet the neat tercets evoke her containment, problematizing the narrative itself. Throughout the collection, Scenters-Zapico inhabits an interstitial space between languages, forms, and traditions, evoking the fluidity of the self. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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The Hunt As a child a macho told me to close my legs or he'd take me to a dark room & make me cry. I closed my legs. He asked me to give him a kiss. I gave him a kiss. I could not stop crying, & he could not understand why. :: My father was a ghost in our house. He would not speak for days, then drop a glass of water on the kitchen floor. My mother always swept up his shatters & buried them in the yard. :: At thirteen a macho put his hands on my knees, then became tarantula, travelled up my skirt. I didn't scream because I felt chosen. I felt lucky he had chosen me to be hunted. :: Machos hunt to watch women in orgasm. Not because they like to see women in pleasure, but because they like to watch women close to death. :: Machos don't know what it is to give birth to the dead. Machos know pleasure through release. Machos hunt to give pain & to witness pleasure. To testify: the resurrection of the body. :: I will not apologize for my desire to love a macho who could crush my skull with his bare fists. :: I apologize to a daughter for telling her to close her legs. Machos are hunting, always hunting to see women close to death. :: I work two jobs & still come home to an empty pantry. I am a bad woman when I can't feed hunger. My labor: the taste of bleach after an alacrán stings my feet. :: I write to machos & never send my letters. In the age of los Zetas, I am a lucky hembra: I have a language to write of the violence of machos. :: I watch the azahars grow into lemons machos pull too early from their branches. I slice each lemon's rind into translucent sheets & place each little sun under the tongue of my macho who eats & eats.Macho :: HembraI laughed because, after all, isn't that what women do--laugh at jokes at their own expense? I was his pocha hermosa. He'd done good because of my fair skin & green eyes. He liked keeping me in my underwear in his room. Like a porcelain doll come to life, I was the perfect object. I screamed & was ashamed. He'd hand me matches & I'd strike each one against my teeth to make a flame. I'd whisper in his ear bruto & he'd hush me with the word hocicona. I'd cry & he'd kiss me quiet. My whole face fit in his cupped hands. He was el macho :: I was la hembra. To clean his body I'd blow smoke from my cigarette on his shoulders. I told myself I had found un buen macho. He was mi cielo: sky of my many deaths. Lima Limón: :Infancia I want to be the lemons in the bowlon the cover of the magazine. I wantto be round, to be yellow, to be pulledfrom branches. I want to be wax, to bewhite with pith, to be bright, to be zestedin the corners of a table. I want youto say my name like the word: Lemon.Say it like the word: Limón. Undress mein strands of rind. I want my saliva to becitrus. I want to corrode my husband'swedding ring. I want to be a lemonwith my equator marked in black ink--small dashes to show my shape: pitted & convex. Excerpted from Lima :: Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico 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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