Melinda Palacio’s first full-length volume of poetry was birthed with modest fanfare but with hopes full and robust. Less than a year later, the book has earned three prominent awards and has taken Palacio on book tours across the nation. This acclaim is richly-deserved and bodes well for a relative newcomer—but indisputably a rising star—in the national literary arena.
Palacio, a
native Californian and part-time resident of New Orleans, has written two other
books, each well-received: Folsom
Lockdown (2010), poetry that won
the Kulupi Press Sense of Place Chapbook Contest in 2009; and Ocotillo Dreams (2011), Palacio’s debut
novel and winner of two prestigious national/ international awards.
Palacio puts Midas and his golden
touch to shame.
Palacio’s Themes
In How Fire Is a Story, Waiting, Palacio skillfully weaves 65 poems
through the four sections of her book—Fire, Air, Water, and Earth—with a
humanity and sensitivity that we all recognize and cherish but cannot always
plumb within ourselves. She speaks of themes closest to our collective heart,
universal, timeless topics that we accept as part of living: family, culture,
loss, reminiscence, nature, and resilience of the human spirit.
These themes envelop her poetry
with immediacy and relevance. Her audience is the everyday community of readers
navigating daily life, the people with whom we interact, people who filled Palacio’s
life and who similarly fill ours. In an authentic, sympathetic voice, she
speaks to all of us and, in a largely autobiographical manner, shares her life
story begotten through metaphorical fires.
Folsom Lockdown: Family Challenges
Her
award-winning poetry chapbook, Folsom
Lockdown, is integrated almost in its entirety into How Fire Is a Story. In Folsom,
Palacio, with some “poetic license,” as she has said, recounted her
father’s domestic abuse, his unreliability as a parent to her and his other
children, and his penchant for conning and manipulating. He ended up imprisoned
in Folsom for domestic assault and attempted murder with a gun. Palacio’s relationship
with her father had been almost nonexistent throughout her life...until she and
her sister visited him in 2009 in prison. Of this visit, which inspired Folsom, Palacio has written: “We had a
wonderful exchange with our father. As he regaled us with stories, all walls
and barriers fell away” (Author’s Note, Folsom
Prison Lockdown, p. 31). Palacio
also writes: “[We] made our trip to Folsom in January. A month later, I sat
down and could not stop writing. A quick lightning downpour of poems turned
into this chapbook” (p. 31).
These
poems, interwoven now throughout How Fire
Is a Story, depict a father who is smooth, handsome, seductive, an exotic
Panamanian with multiple families. She describes him as “the charismatic
lunatic, my father,/ the criminal with the psycho gene and tangled gypsy
beard!” In the poem, “Dancing with
Zorro’s Ghost,” one of the more powerful ones in her book, Palacio paints a
picture of a conflicted man, a Hispanic version of Jekyll and Hyde. Her father,
Antonio, “fights windmills in the night./ ...Tony slipped a piece of metal/
into his sock to protect his coffee-bean colored skin.” In the next stanza,
Palacio describes Tony thus: “With his enemy tucked away for the purple night,
my father wrote poetry./.... [Tony was] nestled like the Man in the Iron Mask,
dreaming of sunshine” (p. 22).
Palacio’s ability to simultaneously
recognize her father’s malice and hurtfulness, and his vulnerability and humanity,
undulates like a powerful wave through the Folsom
sections of her book. Palacio recounts her lack of connectedness to
her father when she was a child: her disbelief that he will visit her, her
rejection of toys he brings when he manages to show up, and his vicious beatings
of her mother. Yet she leaves the door open for finding redemption in him, as
when she says in “Astro Turf Hero”: “On the day of [my mother’s] funeral,/I’m
surprised to learn there were nice people/who loved my father,/who called him friend” (p. 20, Folsom). In “Sin Verguenza Swagger” (“Shameless Swagger”), Palacio
describes the uninhibited sassiness of Panamanians she encounters randomly and
says: “It took a trip to Panama
The Folsom poems also include vignettes of her other family members, of
the beauties and tantrums of Mother Nature, and of Palacio’s reminiscences of
pleasant and painful childhood experiences. As part of How Fire Is a Story, the Folsom
poems are scattered throughout the volume, interwoven with different
emphases and throughout the four subsection headings. But they still carry the
emotional impact they did in the original chapbook.
Three Key Poems
Three poems in particular serve as
linchpins in Palacios’ book, capturing pivotal aspects of her life experiences,
identity, and evolution as a poet and human being. Powerful in the telling and
in the eliciting, the poems form a framework within which her other poems blossom
and give us other looks into her life and observations.
The first
is “El South-Central
Cucuy ” (“The South-Central Boogeyman,” p. 18). Recounted in
the persona of a young girl growing up in the ‘hood, the poem starkly paints
the elements of a disadvantaged environment: a jaded uncle assuring the girl
that she won’t “have a life”; all-too-familiar sounds of gunfire and police
helicopters; fear for one’s life as bullets rip through walls and barely miss
people who should be safe within their homes; the threat of war and bombs; and a
child’s perennial fear of the boogeyman, the Cucuy, the unknown, the embodiment
of evil that is already a reality all around. Appearing as it does near the
book’s beginning, “El South-Central Cucuy” is a child’s narrative, from a
child’s viewpoint: a story of the beginning of things. Palacio ends the poem
thus: “You can’t see the Cucuy who lurks in the hallways, under the bed and in
the closet./The boogeyman with devil’s feet waits to touch your hair in the
dark,/in a crowded house on Albany
Street South-Central L.A. ”
To a child growing up in the ‘hood, fear of the unknown can be a deal-breaker
in the battle for survival and success. Such it could have been for Palacio;
such it was for people she knew early on, as she recounts: “Bullets spared me,
but took the young lives of three on our street.”
The second poem
is “Panamanian Percentage” (p. 56), a rhythmic accounting of her father’s
ethnic heritage. Tony had ancestral roots in Panama ,
Jamaica , Colombia , East India, England ,
and Africa . Palacio details some of the
physical attributes she inherited from her father: “I own his crooked smile, a
slight curl/of the upper lip.” Palacio’s sister inherited Tony’s height and his
“ballsy stride, the stretch of confidence/our father used when he thought/he’d
never get caught.” Palacio muses: “Impossible to tell where I begin/or end,
where our/Panamanian percentage meets.” She clearly cherishes her mother’s Mexican
Indian heritage, “the half made whole by my mother’s feet,/my feet. Feet
furious enough to power a car,/squat Indian feet showing off red toes/in an
even row....” Dichotomies seem to dominate Palacio’s life, as they do her
poems, and the ethnic mixtures she celebrates and accepts in this poem ultimately
define her as an individual and a poet.
The third linchpin
poem, “Iron Cross Suite” (p.99), is heart-breakingly poignant. The
sub-title—“For Blanca Estela Palacio, December 5, 1949-June 4,
1994”—underscores the untimeliness of Palacio’s mother’s death. Blanca’s
“passion cross” roughly symbolizes that of Christ’s “passion cross,” which
depicts his suffering and death in the Catholic ritual, the Stations of the
Cross. The poem describes an iron cross apparently owned by Blanca, with a
dove, fleur de lis, lightning bolts, a scale, moon, rooster, and sun
paralleling Stations of the Cross. The poet describes each station in turn,
recounting a moment, a memory, an event connecting her to her mother in the
past or the aching present. The mother’s refrain in the poem, “Do this in
memory of me,” tethers Blanca’s passion cross to Christ’s suffering and assures
us that Blanca also suffered in her life. As Christ was betrayed shortly before
his death, so also was Blanca betrayed by her beloved priest, who failed to go
to her deathbed when summoned.
Possibly
the most intellectual poem in Palacio’s book, “Iron Cross Suite” is never
heavy-handed in its analogy to Christ’s passion. Palacio carefully selects
reminiscences and images of her mother to lightly, lovingly reveal Blanca’s
strength and faith, and the poet’s own devotion to her. In the final stanzas of
this poem, Palacio writes: “She [Blanca] is divine./Three years pass before I
can step foot in a church or cathedral” (p. 102). Yet this grief is immediately
followed by the revelation that her mother’s final words, scribbled on a piece
of paper in a speeding ambulance, were, “The ambulance guy is cute....The
driver is good, too,” followed by a smiley face. This dichotomy of pathos and
wry humor characterize not only this poem, but the character of Blanca herself
and the relationship she forged with her daughter.
In summary, Palacio’s book brims
with warriors and survivors: immigrants, poor people, abused women,
marginalized children, lonely old maids, exhausted laborers, convicts, and
variations of the above. The world is “the
‘hood” for many, possibly throughout their lives, with boogeymen real and
imagined stealing comfort and security. But her book also includes resilient
souls who squeeze hope and comfort from hardship. Palacio’s book appropriately
is bookended with the Cucuy near the beginning, and the mother whose spunk and
love of life prevailed over the tragedy of her early death at the end: fear and
insecurity on one hand, and affirmation on the other. Sandwiched in between these
linchpin poems is the one celebrating mixture and embracing of polyglot
cultures that define Palacio and the world she navigates.
 |
| Melinda Palacios: Photo by Valerie Smith |
Melinda Palacio is that rare
multi-genre author who has excelled in everything she has done. In addition to
the Kulupi Prize bestowed upon Folsom
Lockdown, her second poetry book, How
Fire Is a Story, Waiting has won the following 2013 awards: Milt Kessler
Award Finalist, Patterson Poetry Prize Finalist, and International Latino Book
Award/Best Poetry Book in English. Her debut novel, Ocotillo Dreams, which started out as a historical account of
immigration but metamorphosed to a more accessible work of fiction when Arizona
Palacio’s
facility with the written word is not all natural talent. She received a degree
in Comparative Literature from University
of California , Berkeley Arizona and California
Palacio is
hip, uninhibited, and frank. California Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera
described her writing in How Fire Is a
Story, Waiting as “jazzy and Pachukona...[with] Bop and ‘swagger’...and
wild, unexpected turns” (Cover blurb).
Yes, all true. But Palacio can also be little-girl traditional, as she
is in “Porch Days” (p. 16): “I’m six, and I sit on the porch Indian style./My
best friend Aurora makes the number four with her legs./We sit and listen to
the slapping sound our thighs make against red concrete.” And Palacio can also
be little-girl scared, as in “Ramona
Street
So
Melinda Palacio’s mixture of contradictions and life experiences spanning
almost coast to coast have given an undeniable authenticity and recognition to
her writings. We devour her work because we see ourselves in it. We believe her
insights because we know she’s been burned by the fire she awaits, the fire
that kindles her stories. And, like moths perennially attracted to flame, we
gravitate toward the fire Palacio creates for us.
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This review was originally posted in a prior version on Hinchas de Poesia Literary Journal, Issue 10, edited by Jim Heavily. www.hinchasdepoesia.com
THELMA T. REYNA
Thelma T. Reyna is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009), which received 4
national awards. Her stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other
non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, textbooks,
anthologies, blogs, and in regional media off and on for over 30 years. Her
poetry chapbooks—Breath & Bone
(2011), and Hearts in Common (June
2013)—was each a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Reyna
writes two blogs and is a guest blogger on two others. She owns the editing/writing consultant
business, The Writing Pros, based in 
