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.
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.
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
ᴥ
“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
ᴥ
“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.
* * *
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.
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