Virgin by Analicia Sotelo Milkweed Editions, 2018 Holy shit. My fellow Houstonian Analicia Sotelo has been ordained to poetry greatness by the likes of Tracy K. Smith (selected one of her poems for Best New Poets 2015), Rigoberto González (selected her manuscript for the 2016 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship), and Ross Gay (selected Virgin for the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize from Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions.) So, there’s nothing that I, your humble reviewer, can really add on to convince anyone to buy this, I think, if some of the greatest poetic minds that were raptured and thus endorsed Sotelo’s exciting voice haven’t already. But here’s my attempt: Analicia Sotelo’s Virgin (Milkweed Editions, 2018) is a poetic dynamo. There’s energy that courses through her lines that build up and up so you won’t know where you’re going until you’re already there. Sotelo understands how far a poem can go in terms of wit and imagery in a way that pushes the distance a reader’s mind can go to imagine new, brave territories fraught with attempts at loving and being loved. Sotelo utilizes every word of every line of every poem so deftly that you’ll go dizzy rereading them to figure out just how the hell she does it. The first poem of the collection begins, “This wedding is some hell…” It’s hilarious because already, Sotelo has made what society often conceives as a woman’s happiest moment in her life into an annoyance, something you’d say about waiting in line at the DMV. What follows are surrealist images right out of a Dalí and/or Kahlo painting (who make their cameos later in poems featuring the speaker’s father and mother, respectively), images that flash quickly into your minds eye because Sotelo builds them so well. For example: “I’m afraid I am a blind goat / with a ribbon in my hair, with screws for eyes.” It’s an image full of such beauty and horror that I’m not sure if I should be scared or entranced or both. Deft, I tell you. The rest of the poem is so quick and beautiful and smooth (which Analicia’s voice does wonders to, if you’ve heard her read) that by the time you catch yourself imagining your own apocalypse, you’re wondering how you got there from a wedding, how society’s imagining of paradise can be a personal hell. This all the first poem still, by the way. Another thing: is it new to interpret ancient Greek figures? No. But fuck me if it keeps happening over and over in American poetry. However, the poems in Virgin have renewed my interest in examining these myths; in another review in Glass Poetry Press, I mentioned never really having been exposed to literature and mythology outside of Europe growing up in Texas. Pretty much unavoidable, many writers of color ground their first exposure to literature through this European conversation of poetry and storytelling as that what’s being taught in schools (at least, while I was growing up.) Sotelo takes Greek mythology and repackages them through this Mexican American lens that finds many of the same tropes of patriarchy present in Mexican American and Greek cultures. As the speaker in the poem “Do You Speak Virgin?” says once: “I am a Mexican American fascinator.” It’s sort of this distaste for cultural hegemony where I, your Latino reviewer, know too much Greek mythology for my own comfort (especially since, you know, I wasn’t really taught much else in terms of storytelling traditions). Shit, I even know about Oenone’s sad tale like I know the Friends theme song: somewhat reluctantly. What does one do with all this knowledge? For Sotelo, you take that shit and run with it. There’s a poem titled “South Texas Persephone” that begins: “Someday the ground will open up / and swallow me.” Yeah, Persephone was the daughter of Zeus and Demeter who, when innocently frolicking in the fields, is abducted by Hades as he opens the earth and pulls her into the underworld. However, Sotelo puts this in conversation with South Texas where us Mexican Americans hang around a lot. One story Mexican Americans tell their children is that if you blaspheme God, the earth will open up and swallow you (made famous by Tomas Rivera’s …y no se lo tragó la tierra [1971]). What begins is this connection of young people being swallowed by the earth because of larger, omnipotent forces at work; Sotelo interprets this in terms of how women are placed in defined, repressive gender roles where this happens: “…the burial of my preferences / before they can even be born.” What does one deserve? What does one have coming to them? What destiny or conception of free will can one have when they are subject and/or forced to exist under a set of codes, mores, and/or beliefs? Dumping Catholic guilt onto a kid is pretty heavy, as is making women believe they have to be married in order to be happy. But damn if Sotelo just didn’t make these stories and issues viewable through a light new for me. Deft, I tell you. The first poem ends with these often-quoted lines of Sotelo’s: I want to know what’s coming in the afterlife before I sign off on arguments in the kitchen & the sight of him fleeing to the car once he sees how far & wide, how dark & deep this frigid female mind can go. Oh men, caballeros. Are we ready for women that “are here to tell you to fuck off[?]” Doesn’t matter. Virgin is one out of the many the bright beacons representative of the current generation of Latina poets that are searing across this American, poetic landscape without stop. It’s an exciting time to be reading poetry when you’ve got poets like Analicia Sotelo. Visit Analicia Sotelo's Website Visit Milkweed Editions' Website

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