My sister gave me this book. “I don’t read a lot of poetry,” she said. “I guess it doesn’t say much to me. But this poetry — this is my language.”
Luis Alberto Urrea writes novels, poems, and short stories. The Tijuana Book of the Dead is poetry, but it has a narrative flow to it. This is border poetry, though it’s interested in bridges as well as borders, and it takes us on a sort of tour of Tijuana: back alleys, canyons, the lawns and suburbs of Los Angeles, deserts, people commuting on the bus to work, people just out of prison, people waiting for miracles or jobs or taxis, people eating chili or green salsa or tomatoes or melted cheese on Wonder bread. We hear the language telling us the stories of these people and these places. Most of the poems in this collection are in English, but a few are in Spanish — I had a friend translate a couple for me, and they’re exceptionally lovely, nodding to Cuban poetry. Some are a fabulous, relaxed mixture:
Y los muchachos cling
To the cantina’s jukebox heart, sing:
We never go nowhere we never see nothing
But work: these fingers bleed every daylong day,
Aching from la joda of the harvest –
Y la muerte, esa puta que nos chifla
From the bus station balcony, from I-10,
From Imperial Ave. truck lot behind the power station,
From waterbreak delirium, from short-hoe
Genuflections down pistolbarrel fields –
Imperial Ave. truck lot behind the power station. Nice.
The imagery is sometimes lyrical, sometimes mystical, sometimes straight from the daily grind, occasionally grotesque. The voices are those of everyday people, usually of the author himself and the people around him: the vatos, as he says, the people who never thought they’d find themselves in a poem. He likes haiku, like these about Chicago:
Jackson & Harlem
I will fuck you up
Come back here motherfucker
You bout to get served
Ogden & Western
Oil change and filter —
$39 special!
Coffee and donuts
Chicago Sun-times
Killed wife, girl, in-laws —
Several hard hammer-blows —
Insulted manhood
There’s humor and tenderness in these poems, but there’s anger, too. “Definition” tells us that “Illegal Alien, adj./n.” is “A term by which/ An invading colonial force/ Vilifies/ Indigenous cultures/ By identifying them as/ An invading colonial force.” The repetition and the line breaks make the poem snarl.
I’ll close with my favorite poem. I loved this for all kinds of reasons, but two stand out: one is the idea of naming the nameless, and the other is the idea that the afterlife is a town in Mexico where the poet’s grandfather is in charge. See if you can find this book, and see what you think about it.
There is a town in Mexico
where no one ever dies, and those who have
passed on pass back through
the cottonwood square where alamos trees
are whitewashed halfway up
their trunks, and those few awkward dead
the world coughs up stop
by a bench where my grandfather sits
at a black typewriter and a stack
of oystershell colored sheets. “Name,”
he says as he rolls the page
with that ancient sound, that machine
of poetry and dreams taking its morning taste
of forever. And those inarticulate dead
who made it through mango trees, agaves spiked
a dusty jade, past snapping turtles
in the huerta’s bog, scratch their heads,
try to remember their names. Any name
will do. My grandfather, for example,
calls John the Baptist “Juanito.” Zapata
never comes to town, or he’d get a name as well.
The dead call themselves their own true names:
Honeysuckle, Hummingbird, Wind,
Coyote, Blue Deer. My grandfather types.
Once they sign the page, these few
scoop a drink from the cool stone
fountain, shade their eyes, and stare
at all those shiny
forgotten coins.
I like the mixture of Spanish and English in the part you quote. The volume sounds interesting.
I don’t read remotely as much poetry as you do, so I thought of you when I read it. You might try it — I’d be interested in what you thought.
I like the haikus and the combination of Spanish and English in the excerpt you chose. I had Urrea’s Into the Beautiful North checked out from the library last year but never got around to it. He was at the National Book Festival in D.C. and a friend saw him there and loved his talk. I’ve heard more and more good things about his writing since then.
I hadn’t heard of him at all before my sister gave me this book, but now I’d like to read more by him!
Aw, this makes me happy. I read his book Into the Beautiful North in 2015 and thought it was just terrific — I’d expected it to be really heartbreaking, and overall it was hopeful and cheerful and all good things. These excerpts are beautiful too. What an awesome, well-rounded writer he is.
You’re really convincing me to try Into the Beautiful North next. I hadn’t heard of it before now and it sounds great!