I like poems that are buildings of images; I like poems that are stories. Kristin Naca writes both those kinds of poems, and also writes lyrical poems, romantic poems, poems that play with language(s) and words. Sometimes the poems in this collection were too lyrical for me, or too language-focused, but others are just lovely, like “Speaking English Is Like” (read it here – scroll down a bit to find the link to it). (Megan was reading the book and told me to read this poem (the first one in the book) and it made me want to read more.)
Some of the poems of the book have bits of Spanish in them; others, like “Todavía No”/”Not Yet,” appear twice: once in Spanish and once in English, which makes me wonder about Naca’s writing process: whether she wrote these poems in English first then translated to Spanish, or Spanish first then translated to English, or whether she wrote the poems both in English and in Spanish, maybe going back and forth as she went. The remnants of my high school Spanish are not good enough for me to read the the poems in Spanish in their entirety without consulting their English counterparts, but I can get enough from the Spanish that I didn’t skip over them. Some lines, like this one, seem more graceful to me in Spanish: “La venas de la cala están labradas con paredes. No, piedras. No, pérdidas.” (p 3). (That one in English, two pages later, is this: “The veins of the creek encrusted with walls. No, stones. No, losing.”) But others I like better in English: “Green glows loose without its leaves,” (p 6) is delicious; “El color verde se difumina sin leaves” (p 3) seems less so.
Other poems I liked a whole lot: “Uses for Spanish in Pittsburgh,” with its images of rooftops and steeples and shoestores and its story of family, “Ode to Glass,” about a Pepsi bottle and memory, “Grocery Shopping with My Girlfriend Who Is Not Asian,” and “Las Meninas/The Maids of Honor,” which is probably my favorite poem in this volume because it’s so satisfyingly smart and conversational and visual and, well, also probably because it’s about a painting. Also: parts of “House,” a seven-section prose poem.
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