Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo's Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites

La Bloga-Tuesday welcomes Michael Sedano's Guest Reviewer, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, PhD, especially with today's review of Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo's latest collection. La Bloga and Michael Sedano celebrated Bermejo's first collection, Posada, Offerings of Witness and Refuge, in a living room floricanto (link). It's a double pleasure welcoming this review of Bermejo's newest offering and welcoming Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, whose own YA book is due for a review here at La Bloga.  

Guest Reviewer, Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

By Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, PhD

Anyone who knows me knows that love poems aren’t my thing. When I taught high school English, I selected obscure love poems that didn’t exactly jive with teenage notions of love. Even now when I include the theme of love in my creative writing classes, I tend to select poems that capture this notion of love from an unexpected viewpoint, in forms like letter and list that my students have not seen before.

Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites changed my perception of love and the way various poetic forms can be used to express love to the people around us. Bermejo’s poems offer a complex juxtaposition of various kinds of love and the trauma of different types of battles. With these incantations, she summons the wisdom of the ancestors and using their guidance, offers consejos of her own for the next generation. 

With three distinct parts, the collection revels in love: maternal and romantic, love of friends and kids, love of nature and music, and perhaps most importantly, love of self. Bermejo provides different perspectives on the joys and pains of love during times of battle.

In Part One, many of the poems center youthful innocence. The nature imagery in “Dancing to the Tree of Their Own Mum” and “Beach Evening Primrose” reveals the joy of children and mothers; it offers hope. There are also several concrete poems throughout the collection. My favorite is “The High Dive,” which captures both joy and defiance. Several other poems resonate with Tía love and caution. Through “Even in War,” Bermejo reveals a closeness not all extended kinfolk know. This poem about a tragic topic also echoes joy. 

Bermejo includes found family in her love, penning poems for friends in 2020; she supports teacher efforts in the strike and momma memories of more relaxing days. She also dedicates other poems to people who have experienced tremendous struggle. 

In poems like “Birthday Candle for Breonna Taylor” the speaker addresses key moments in our history and reminds readers how they are relevant to our present day. With these words, Bermejo offers respite from the pain. She also pays homage to place. I’ve heard a previous version of “For the Love of Home” and shared it with students to inspire their own writing about their homes. The expanded version has surprising new details and an altered rhythmic structure that increases the impact of each moment.

In Part Two, Bermejo plunges readers into the battle, confronts the ghosts of war and the monuments to our tragic US history. Yet it is only one version, she realizes, and fills in the gaps with images, rhythms, and movements of words that dance across the page. They carry us to the other side with love. 

Embedded within the Gettysburg National Monument poems are testimonies of confronting racism along the creative journey. Bermejo exposes how she engages white people in difficult conversations with “Comfort Food for White Spaces.” The speaker in “Self-Portrait of Expectation” embraces the haunting in order to empower herself, in order to overcome the loneliness society has convinced her she should feel. With her strength, she changes the narrative. “Counting the Dead” chronicles the death, grief, and loss that originated at the battle site, but there is far too much death and grief and loss to be contained there. The poem summons memories of loved ones lost and the pain of that lost love; the tragedies beyond the battles, loss that should not be. The poems in Part Two also offer an alternative to a redacted history or, rather, a neglected one. Bermejo reinserts brown people in places where they’ve been overlooked or erased.

In Part Three, Bermejo juxtaposes the end of love with the trauma when love does not come. Only then is the speaker empowered to revel in the erotic, to subvert the expectations of sadness and shame. Bermejo embraces the body and celebrates its power. She invokes the wisdom of  Frida Kahlo and Audre Lorde as she illustrates how self-love can empower women through the darkest times. Appropriately, the collection ends with “Ritual of Wholeness,” which brings together the pieces of what has been torn apart by the battles.

This is a collection of poems in a variety of forms that can alter readers’ perspectives on love. When I create my next syllabus, I will expand my love unit to include Bermejo’s poems. Follow @xochitljulisa on Instagram so you can join her on her book tour.

Incantation:  Love Poems for Battle Sites (link)

ISBN: 978-1-957840-21-5
Publication Date: October 2023
Format: Paperback
Pages: 97
Publisher: Mouthfeel Press

La Bloga welcomes Guest Reviewer, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, PhD.

Chicana Feminist and former Rodeo Queen, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera (she/her) writes so the desert landscape of her childhood can be heard as loudly as the urban chaos of her adulthood. She is a Macondista and works for literary equity through Women Who Submit. 

A former high school teacher, she earned an MFA at Antioch University and a PhD at USC. Her short stories have been anthologized and nominated for awards. Her play Blind Thrust Fault was featured in Center Theater Group Writers’ Workshop Festival. 

Reichle-Aguilera's YA novel, Breaking Pattern, is available from Inlandia Books. 

About Breaking Pattern

Adriana Elizabeth Herrera Bowen, a Latina living in Riverside California, is an eleventh grader who loves horses more than people. 

School is hard. 

She wants to win the All-Around Cowgirl saddle more than anything, but her parents make choices that disrupt her plans and force her to make drastic decisions.