On The Tip Of Your Mother’s Tongue JP Infante Thirty West Publishing, 2020 JP Infante’s chapbook On The Tip Of Your Mother’s Tongue (Thirty West Publishing, 2020) dissolves slowly and readers will want to spend considerable time diving into each poem. Dealing with homelessness, a mother’s addiction, and a mother’s mental illness, On The Tip Of Your Mother’s Tongue examines life’s troubling moments and turns them into pure introspections. Perhaps the most prominent instance of turning an unsettling moment into reflection is when the speaker is meeting with a drug dealer. The speaker muses, in the poem, “Buying Cocaine,” “The dealer will remind you that nothing is pure.” In a relatively somber moment, the situation is flipped on its head, looking instead at the relationship between the speaker and his mother as well as life in general. This instance foreshadows the speaker questioning the mother’s sanity: “You were seven or eight the first time you questioned your mother’s sanity. […] she said, ‘If they ask, tell them I’m crazy.’ To this day you’re not sure if she was joking.” Straying from a typical mother-child relationship, characterized by trust and honesty, a reader might expect the speaker to become withdrawn and shy away from discussing the imperfect aspects of childhood and parental relationships. However, Infante uses this moment to illustrate, because of hardships brought on by marginalization due to racial identity, addiction, mental illness, and homelessness, among others, life is not purely moments of happiness and bliss. Life is a mixture of moments to savor and moments we might want to disregard. Regardless, all moments are chances to better understand ourselves and those around us, but also how we relate to the world and form relationships with those in our lives. These moments of self-introspection are connected through the prose style of the pieces. Each short segment and paragraph address the speaker’s journey to understand his mother. These paragraphs show the reader snapshots of the speaker’s life, the relationship with his mother, and mediative instances of understanding childhood. In the closing paragraph, the image of the New York skyline reflects the speaker’s up and down relationship with his mother. In the poem entitled, “Almost All About Your Mother,” the adult speaker contemplates:

Regarding his mother’s memory loss and mental illness, the speaker is overcome with emotion. Using another instance of introspection during an emotionally fraught moment, On The Tip Of Your Mother’s Tongue makes it clear that forming bonds with one another, especially our family is not an easy road. Like, the train the speaker rides and his mother’s train of thought, the tracks of our lives curve, bend, and transverse uneven and rocky terrain. As the speaker suggests, we should not bury the ups and downs, but we should remember them, hold them on the tip of our tongues so that we can speak of them, learn from them, and use them to better understand ourselves and others we love. Visit JP Infante's Website Visit Thirty West Publishing's Website

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