DEFACING THE MONUMENT

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” observed W.H. Auden, sagely. Briante, a professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Arizona, acknowledges as much when, midway through this centrifugal exercise, she writes, “we do not need more poems at the port of entry any more than we need the concertina wire that now sparkles like tinsel through Nogales.” In what presumably is supposed to be prose poetry that occasional breaks out in a line or two of metered lyric, the author agitates for an activist poetry that does for detained migrants what Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” did for the besieged miners of Depression-era West Virginia: “And if I lay my white woman’s body on the border between Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora,” she writes, as if channeling Karen Finley or Marina Abramovic, “I do not become migrant although I might feel the pinch and pressure of cement under my hips, might smell how the concrete carries the odor of sun and piss.” Elsewhere she writes, with welcome self-awareness, “Dear documentarian, dear poet, what is the value of your privilege?” The suffering of others—of “The Other”—is the central trope in an intermittently sharp yet scattershot harangue against things ranging from “racist, misogynist and capitalist oppression” to the melting of polar ice and mass shootings. Those who enjoy this sort of thing will find this book invaluable. As for others—well, thanks to Luis Alberto Urrea, Kathryn Ferguson, Valeria Luiselli, Charles Bowden, and many other witnesses, there are dozens of books and authors to consult before this book, which contains nuggets of wisdom (too few and far between) but fails to cohere.

Thanks for reading.
Please Share, Comment, Like the post And Follow, Subscribe CTS Store.

fromSource