Sarah Louise Garrido, faithful error: poems

 

NOW

Now the hardest part: exquisite second bloom,
the roses suddenly reviving. 

I turn to show you another
sunset trembling the sky
into fiery orange, and bright pink, 

sunset I want to put in your eye. 

Open the sockets again,
see the things I see. 

But the phone rings by mistake.
Onslaught of dust, stacks of belongings,
you in the chair, now not, a missing
litany of questions, driving soundlessly by the static sea. 

The hardest part does not cease, but lessens by danger.

Now: sparrows swooping into any here without you,
now not knowing what you would finally say. 

I was curious to see San Francisco Bay-area poet and creative director Sarah Louise Garrido’s full-length poetry debut, faithful error: poems (Fort Collins, CO: The Center for Literary Publishing, 2026), an assemblage of first-person observational narratives that occasionally lean into the metaphysical. “Joy withers away from the sons of man.” she writes, as part of the opening poem, “THE BIRDS HAVE NEVER FAILED ME, PART 1,” “All that’s left is this happiness I have // here with you. All I’ve ever wanted. / Of course I want this. // We don’t know what we want. / Rains come, and we rejoice.” Arranged in four numbered sections—“WANT FOR NOTHING,” “FEEL FREE,” “FOR THE TAKING” and “A FRUIT COMPELLED”—her titles set themselves as poem-anchors, solidifying a narrative that might not wander per se, but moves free along the ground laid down by that title-tether, stretching out and through, but held to each poem’s signpost.

One might suggest this a book of perspectives, set in lyric narratives, Garrido writes of questions and attention, sure, in day-book journal poems perpetually composed around and towards an unseen “you” against the negotiations and interiorities of this nameless narrator. Through Garrido’s poems, there is always a perspective being offered; a speaker, and someone external being spoken to. Not merely declarations or documented thoughts but a kind of directed speech. Even the opening of the rhetorical lyric of “THE COLD LORD,” that begins: “O lord, / if you would but bruise, / batter my body / under the mass of stars, // I’d know you are.” It is as though each of these poems, the narrator requires another character for the sake of counterpointing her perspectives and narratives, such as the poem “YOUR LOSS” begins, opening:

Absence of birdsong in your backyard,
cloud strands not quite making it
into any form. A year of unrealizeds. 

For example, my daughter cannot swim;
the last time she tried was before everything shut down,
my swelling body and her baby-fat arms under the moon. 

My son does not understand
the look on your face, your words. 

Waving at your husband
through the glass, I’m at a loss, 

your loss. A year of windows,
trapped behind solid surfaces—
nothing to do but wait
for you to emerge beyond skin, 

taking on light, finally
the form you always were.

 

Brent Ameneyro, A Face Out of Clay: Poems

 

ODYSSEUS AS A MEXICAN BOY

the Cyclops sometimes appears as an angry school principal
who yells at the boy in Spanish
until a large vein splits his forehead

into two hemispheres
and his dark brown skin

becomes the earth
the boy sails away until he finds a new land
with bright green grass

which is actually artificial turf for a soccer field
he comes across Poseidon
who is a goalie
that punches the ball with a closed fist

Penelope is a blonde second grader back in California
Calypso is a Mexican girl who teaches a boy to dance

I was curious to see the full-length debut by Los Angeles poet and editor Brent Ameneyro, following the chapbook Puebla (Ghost City Press, 2023), A Face Out of Clay: Poems (Fort Collins CO: The Center for Literary Publishing, 2024). A Face Out of Clay is a collection of first-person lyrics that explores context as well as form, attempting to define the self, especially between the seeming-poles of two distinct cultural considerations, between Mexican and American, overlaying other literary considerations across his own narratives, from Greek Odysseus to Ulysses. As he writes to open the poem “ULYSSES IN PUEBLA”: “He cleans his lips with two wipes / of his Jorge Campos jersey. / Damn that new kid in school. / Damn him. Hope he trips / and can’t play for a few weeks.” Across these poems, Ameneyro is first and foremost a storyteller, examining the American experience through the lens of his own Mexican background, providing echoes similar to that of Mexican American poet, editor and teacher Jose Hernandez Diaz’s recent full-length debut, Bad Mexican, Bad American (Cincinnati OH: Acre Books, 2024) [see my review of such here]. Ameneyro might utilize that initial and simultaneous dual connection and disconnect as a kind of foundation for the collection as whole, he quickly furthers his reach by offering perspectives and insights into examples from the larger, surrounding population, each of whom are looking for some human way to connect. “Nobody stopped to ask / if you are lonely // on the long drive home. / You are so calm,” he writes, to open the poem “TO THE GUY WHO DRESSED A MANNEQUIN AND PROPPED IT UP IN / THE PASSENGER SEAT TO USE THE CARPOOL LANE,” “so still // as you look beyond everyone, / past the illusion of daylight; it’s hard to tell // where the black of your eye ends / and the infinite black of the universe // begins. Who sat there before?” In a very fine collection, debut or otherwise, Ameneyro displays himself as a narrative collage-artist, attending elements from all directions while holding still to that relatively straightforward through-line, which allows any lyric and drift to remain purposeful, propulsive. “Hidden above the ash / in the sky,” he writes, as part of “ULYSSES IN PUEBLA,” “a red-legged honeycreeper wanders / the empty space.”

 

Gale Marie Thompson, Mountain Amnesia: Poems

 

A Rank, Bleak Devotion

That violence lies in writing is not so far
from the truth. This is the animal I knew before

I started, whose neck I wished to rub my own against.
She brings the word mercy into the field.

Her mouth staggers over the counting, the one
and one and one of bodies soaked in oil. In the blue

of gathered facts it feels the same: splattered
mouth, bloody bulb of the sign. I keep practicing

the problem, To get back at, to get back at, the letters
written on a field of dark paper, disorder.

I make lists. I peel onions beneath my skin
and push them out of me. I wake up

in the morning and realize that a sex dream
can also be a sexual assault dream. Mercy, healing—

these are words I’ve never used in a poem before.
Can I write into her, she whose own wool

touches mine? A blunter way to say: am I a body
who depends on other bodies? I make lists.

A loved posture can also be a speech act.
This is how it begins. What will seep will seep.

Having deeply enjoyed North Georgia poet Gale Marie Thompson’s second full-length collection, Helen or My Hunger (Portland OR: YesYes Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], I was very excited to see her latest: Mountain Amnesia: Poems (Fort Collins CO: The Center for Literary Publishing, 2023), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry. As final judge Felicia Zamora writes of the collection: “Mountain Amnesia stretches thin the fibrous tissues of grief that inhabit the body, mind, and ether of existence from burrowing traumas. These lamentations expose the weight of abuse, longing and loss, unanswered prayers, and an inescapable natural law: ‘this I know: that even evil men die.’” There’s such an unflinching sharpness to these poems, and Thompson’s is a fierce and precise first-person lyric of violence, dark survival and a weighted grief. “In the time it took to produce / this sentence,” she writes, to open the poem “Turnover,” “the spinal // shadow of my house has leaned / its wet angle over the yard // so completely, a massacre / so small—yet loved, like // the family lick of the herd— [.]” In this third full-length collection, Thompson continues her engagement through densely-packed lyrics that explore dark paths, dark threads: a thread I’ve increasingly seen across American poetry these past few years, whether exploring titles by YesYes Books generally (including recent titles by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach [see my review here], Alycia Pirmohamed [see my review here] and Allison Blevins [see my review here]), or titles such as Jenny Molberg’s The Court of No Record (Louisiana State University Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] and Claire Schwartz’s Civil Service (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. “There must be an aphorism here / about thunder and discipline,” she writes, as part of “The Law of Jocasta,” the poem Felicia Zamora quotes from as part of her blurb, “how its roll and hone engraves / from inside. Even Queen Elizabeth / once remade herself a virgin / in this soggy, pink light. Because / this I know: that even evil men die. / It’s constitutional. It’s the law.”

Set as a quartet of numbered groupings of poems, Thompson’s poems don’t merely examine, but simultaneously dismantle and reassemble; one might describe the poems in this collection as as exploring the dark shadows of human experience. “March killed so much this year / just like every year. I hear that death exists,” she writes, as part of the poem “No Witness,” “I hear it and I hear it, / but I keep my mouth away from the wind, / I keep its noises muddied in the woods.” It is a book of survival mechanisms, witness and deep grief, and composing these pieces as a way to push through to the other end, or at least, as close as might be possible. As part of her December 2021 ’12 or 20 questions’ interview, she describes her then-work-in-progress, a manuscript she responds via email is an earlier iteration of Mountain Amnesia:

I’ve been working on this manuscript called Dummy Prayer for a number of years now, and new poems come in each year and change its face a bit more each time. During the pandemic I’ve been hiking and reading in the mountains around where I live, and even before the pandemic I was living a pretty isolated life here in North Georgia. Over the last few years, I’ve had a few friends pass away unexpectedly, as well as some other losses and oblivions and changes that (like always) have affected my relationship with the world. So, all of that together means that my poems are very much influenced by the messiness of nature in Appalachia, along with the messiness of loneliness and grief, of a longing for connection. In these poems, nature is constantly working on its own disappearance. The rotting plants and animal bones and organic matter are housed in the same world as the ramps and bellflowers on the verge of opening. All this to say, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how we connect with each other, or, to quote Adrienne Rich, “the grit of human arrangements and relationships: how we are with each other.” The frictions in communicating public and private experiences to each other. And so I was thinking about these arrangements, how we keep each other alive, and that’s a huge part of Dummy Prayer.