Spotlight on “Mexican Jenny and Other Poems” (Anhinga Press) by Barbara Brinson Curiel

Barbara Brinson Curiel is a Professor in the Departments of English and Critical Race, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Humboldt State University. Her areas of interest include Chicana/o and Latina/o Literatures, Chicana Feminisms, Women of Color Feminisms, and Transnational Literatures. She focuses her scholarship on the work of authors Sandra Cisneros, Helena María Viramontes and Ana Castillo. She has served as the Director of the Ethnic Studies Program, and supervises Master’s Theses in the English Department.

Curiel is also featured in Rebozos de Palabras: An Helena María Virmontes Critical Reader (University of Arizona Press), edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs. Her essay is titled, “’Had They Been Heading for the Barn All Along?’: Viramontes’s Chicana Feminist Revision of Steinbeck’s Migrant Family” where she compares and contrasts Viramontes’s now classic novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, with John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

Curiel was named the 2012 winner of the Levine Prize in Poetry for her book, Mexican Jenny and Other Poems. The award includes publication by Anhinga Press and a $2,000 prize. The Philip Levine Prize in Poetry is an annual book contest proudly sponsored by the M.F.A. Program at California State University, Fresno.

I had the opportunity to receive an advance reviewer's copy, and I am delighted that I did. Barbara Brinson Curiel's language is spare and lovely, a momentary mask for the hard realities she explores: the challenges of immigrant life; back- and soul-breaking manual labor; daily assaults of seemingly benign bigotries; battered women fighting back. Mexican Jenny and Other Poems traverses these roads from El Paso to Humboldt, Cripple Creak to Stockton, Mexico to the United States. Curiel offers a strong and distinctive poetic voice that should be noticed, appreciated and studied.  

From the Author: Throughout my writing career I have been interested in the stories that lie submerged below and between other narratives. Many poems in this collection tell stories that are the subtext, that are at the substrata, of other more dominant stories. These poems examine the domestic, the working class, and both the private individual experiences and the unrecognized histories of Latina women.

I came upon the story behind the title poem, “Mexican Jenny,” in a back issue of a textile arts magazine. A short article announced a quilt exhibit that included a crazy quilt Jenny made in the 1920s, when she was incarcerated at the prison in Cañon City, Colorado.

According to the article, Jenny had been a prostitute in Cripple Creek, a gold mining town, and she killed her husband after he beat her up for not bringing home enough money. She was convicted of murder, and in prison made a quilt from her working girl clothes, complete with the embroidered image of her dead husband. When she contracted tuberculosis in prison, the quilt was sold and the money used to send her to Mexico where she died.

This story haunted me. I wanted to know who this woman was, what brought her to Colorado, and what brought her into “the life.” I used the bare bones of this story and began to flesh it out with my own imaginings.

I also researched the lives of prostitutes in western mining towns and eventually learned some of the facts of the real Jenny’s case. I found the historical record’s contradictions and improbabilities to be essential to the story, so I wove them into my poem. Because of these conflicts of fact, folklore and interpretation, I have given her story three different endings, told in multiple voices.

Barbara Brinson Curiel 

Praise for Mexican Jenny and Other Poems:

“Are we the stories told about us, or the stories we tell ourselves? Barbara Brinson Curiel’s Mexican Jenny, a fine, crazy quilt of a first book, is her wise and wistful reply. Gaze into the mirror of her lines long enough, and you may find yourself, blinking back.

–Cornelius Eady, Miller Family Chair, Professor of English and Theater, The University of Missouri-Columbia

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“Barbara Curiel’s poetry submerges us in the interior landscapes of the everyday and the mythic: the empty vessels of pots and cans blessed in a family kitchen, the wolf-blood-stained apron of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, a quilt stitched in a jail cell by a woman “mining gold / from the dirt of my life.” At the heart of this collection which offers up an ‘Ars Domestica’ of a poet’s life is ‘Mexican Jenny,’ Curiel’s imaginative re-telling of the story of Jenny Wenner, a prostitute convicted of killing her abusive husband in Cripple Creek, Colorado in 1913. This structure serves to remind us all how at the center of every ‘Mexican’ woman’s life are the undocumented lives of ‘ragged men buried daily in the mines / and women whose every mouthful depended / on what was brought to the surface.’ Here is an illuminating work that unearths and pays lyrical tribute to the labor of brown women across borders and other divides.”

–Deborah Paredez, author of This Side of Skin and co-founder of CantoMundo

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“Master poet Barbara Brinson Curiel wields all the stunning power and raw honesty for which she is best known. This collection is both delightful and unsettling, ranging from fables for a modern world to the hard-hitting title poem, ‘Mexican Jenny,’ to the incomparable and captivating slice of culture in poems like ‘Recipe: Hinterland Tamales,’ with a spicy sprinkling of humor throughout. The language is direct–bare and beautiful. In “Immigrant Partoum,” Brinson Curiel both follows religiously and simultaneously shatters and alters the form of a partoum, as immigrants’ lives follow, reflect, shatter, and alter the form of a native community. A delicious dessert of poetry for the modern world–and as full of surprises as it is of truth. Bravo to Brinson Curiel’s brave new world of poetry!”

–Carmen Tafolla, Ph.D., Poet Laureate, City of San Antonio

From Mexican Jenny and Other Poems:

“Mexican Jenny”

1.

Girls like me

come from alleys

from dirt floors

from cold kitchens

from one thin blanket.

Girls like me

come from fists

from passing strangers

from wandering fathers

from mothers with one heel

hooked on the bar stool.

Girls like me

come from drought

from war.

2.

When I was a child in Acapulco

I worked for a rich family

sweeping their kitchen

washing their dishes.

One day, after a few nips, the cook,

who was my mother's friend,

had said, Come, work for me

in the big house.

I stood on a wooden box

washed dishes stamped with indigo

trees and flowers, with birds

like none I'd seen.

I stood elbow

deep in dirty water, dreamed

of far places without greasy pans

nor the boss's wandering hands.

3.

The boss's wife had a red

silk shawl embroidered

with many-colored swallows.

She draped it like a flag on the back of her chair.

It had come on a ship from Manila,

from that land of ship builders and sailors,

of travelers who, years before, brought

Chinese porcelain and silk to Acapulco.

Every time I walked by

I fingered its edges

and felt like I was dipping my fingers

into the tide.

After I'd found the fault lines

in one cup too many,

when I'd daydreamed one

dish too many to pieces,

the cook ran me off,

but not before I'd pinched that shawl,

rapped it around my waist

under my dirty skirt.

Running home

the silk rubbed

my legs,

a river current.

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AWP'S ANNUAL CONFERENCE COMES TO SEATTLE!

Each year AWP holds it conference and bookfair in a different city and this year it's in Seattle, specifically at the Washington State Convention Center & Sheraton Seattle Hotel, February 26 through March 1, 2014. For a general overview of this year's conference including panel and event schedules, visit here. I will be moderating a panel titled "Chicana/o Noir: Murder, Mayhem and Mexican Americans" with panelists Lucha Corpi, Manuel Ramos, Sarah Cortez and Michael Nava, on Friday, February 28, noon to 1:15 p.m. For more specific information on this panel visit this link.

I plan on doing a special La Bloga post before the conference where I want to highlight the panels and events that feature Chican@ and Latin@ writers. So, to help me with this, please visit my website and use the e-mail link to send me information on the panel(s) you'd like me to mention. Please include a link to the AWP description, as well. Also, please put "AWP - La Bloga" in the subject line so I can keep track of what's coming in. SEND ME THE PANEL/EVENT INFORMATION BY FEBRUARY 14 TO MAKE CERTAIN TO BE INCLUDED IN MY FEBRUARY 17 POST.