Guest Review: the matchstick litanies

La Bloga welcomes the eloquent voice of poet Carmen Calatayud sharing her poet's views on the recently-published collection by jo reyes-boitel, the matchstick litanies. 

Here is the best kind of recommendation, that of a fellow poet. 

Calatayud refers to the poet and speaker as they/them. 

Michael Sedano

the matchstick litanies. jo reyes-boitel. Next Page Press, 2023. 

ISBN: 978-1-7366721-4-3 

by Carmen Calatayud 

Flames and smoke are encroaching from the moment the matchstick litanies begins.In this poetic memoir by jo reyes-boitel, a dramatic opening brings us into a house on fire that causes the speaker and their mother to rush out into the street after police pound on the door. But it also brings us into a family on fire: Sometimes with blazing explosions, and at other times with flames burning low while emotional dysregulation percolates. 

the matchstick litanies takes us on a journey of a two-child family with a Cuban mother and Mexican American second-generation father, homes in Florida and Texas, and how a family of four live through domestic violence, addiction, the Vietnam War, PTSD, and the legacy of their indigenous colonized peoples.

Throughout the book, reyes-boitel masterfully takes the reader back and forth from disaster to muted danger, from past to present, and from childhood to adulthood. We are gripped by this family and each character who enters and exits.   

We meet the speaker’s parents in the poem date night and quickly learn about the dynamics of their relationship that include music by the Isley brothers, his hands resting at her hips, yelling, a face slap and clumsy advances—a mixture of romance and violence that becomes clearer as we learn about the PTSD the speaker’s father suffers from in the poem corner house:

Dark evenings and bad dreams stir again.

My father’s mood falls back.

 

December marks his return from Vietnam.

     Sallow under eyes

a sign of his walks around the house’s perimeter

in the middle of the night.

 

During the day he watches war documentaries

in the back room, his thumb presses

hard against the volume button

until the sound of helicopter blades thunders

against our bedroom walls.

 

This is how we celebrate Christmas.

I knot strings pulled from the hem of my dress   quiet

so as not to trip the wire

haphazardly coiled within him.

 

He’s set a bomb under this house

     Mom says

And it’s ticking away at us.

 

This poem has a footnote that explains a shocking detail about the mother, a secret that is all the more potent revealed in small print after the end of the poem. (I won’t give it away here.) 

reyes-boitel surprises the reader in many ways. As we get to know the mother, father and brother, as well as the speaker, the poet offers rich details of personality and behavior. We discover elements of nature, food and music to ground us as we move through the family’s geography, pain and snapshots of pleasure.

In the poem bird calls, we witness the speaker’s brother shooting and killing birds—blue jays and robins—and we viscerally feel that this is a boy to be feared: 

I call out to him

real hunters don’t shoot and leave their dead

they kill to provide, to feed themselves

 

his face sours

and we have two days without shooting

 

in those two days he is a menace,

his feet near trampling me, his voice an echo of mine,

he pushes his body into my room

            and I scream at him

and at this circumstance:

this is summer vacation and we are ruthless animals 

The mother in reyes-boitel’s work stands out as well, and we learn about her in the poem bitter oranges. In fact, this mother is the mother many of us had:

This is what has made her mad, she realizes that she took the role

she never really wanted, that it weighed so much more

than the lilt of freedom.

 

Losing freedom is worse than never having it.

Maybe.

 

I shouldn’t have had kids, she says,

not looking in my direction.

 

We then follow the mother’s life, which is captured in this edited segment of the poem:

Minnesota an outlier. Cuba made myth.

Homestead sometimes. Miami when she feels free.

Florida, in one way or another, always.

 

Central Texas an endurance, like bitter oranges.

 

Dulce de naranja agria. . . . . . .

 

Boiled, over and over in fresh water,

they become ghosts of themselves.

 

Doused in sugar and boiled down once more.

A sweet made from impossible tartness.

 

Like the best memoir writers, reyes-boitel has the capacity to look back at their suffering, share what they have learned, and show us how to live with resilience.

In the matchstick litanies, we traverse through prose poems, lyric poems and fragmented poems that dart and jump across the page, each form carefully chosen to create the right atmosphere for the subject matter.

 reyes-boitel uses pages as theater stages for themes from a complicated family and the speaker’s life: machismo, sexual abuse, and learning how to deal with a dangerous sibling.

 In the closing poem, unmasking, the speaker is driving around the Rio Grande Valley where they now live, and tells us:

Possibilities are sticky things here.

They ease their way in,

past my walls.

 

            I have my walls.

 

Later in this poem, they find a quiet hopefulness in nature, even as they know they don’t have all the answers:

Alone in this place, alone but woven

into the insistence of the people here, constant

as bird caws, as stars bursting, constant

as our drowsy and constant sun,

and the wind reaching for my face,

building something within

I can’t yet name.

 

Along with reyes-boitel, we ride the waves of myth, history and survival, and are washed to the shore, battered but clear-eyed and fully alive by the end. Reading the poet’s vision of self and family caused me to view myself and my own family with more loving kindness.  

Throughout this collection is the wisdom of a speaker who turns direct observation into poetry. We learn from them, no matter the age in these poems, how to become a tree rooted in the earth. An elder as compassionate witness.

In the midst of fear and darkness, these poems offer a luminous path of courage. I’m grateful I took the matchstick litanies journey. I hope you’ll take it too.

Link to publisher: https://nextpage-press.com/the-matchstick-litanies-by-jo-reyes-boitel.html

Carmen Calatayud is the daughter of immigrants: A Spanish father and Irish mother. Her book In the Company of Spirits was a runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award and a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Her poetry has recently appeared in Rogue Agent and Tahoma Literary Journal, and was nominated for a 2023 Best of the Net Award. 

Carmen is a Larry Neal Poetry Award winner and a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow. Her book This Tangled Body will be published by FlowerSong Press in collaboration with Letras Latinas in Spring 2024.

https://www.press53.com/carmen-calatayud