Review: Out of the Ashes, Familiar Voices

Review: Richard Vargas. The Screw City Poems. Colchester, IL: Roadside Press, 2025 (link)

Michael Sedano

There’s this thing about poetry books, or my poetry books at any rate. They grow in number; I buy, I’m given, I find stuff I like, and then acquire more. Bookshelves bow under weight of disorderly storage and barely controlled acquisition. Boxes of books hide in attic spaces.

Michael Sedano with a selection of books by Richard Vargas

Now and again, perhaps in search of something else, serendipity, or some unarticulated need—I pull a poetry book from its hiding place. I flip through the dog-ears, read, and wonder. Where a paper clip has embossed its form into the paper leaving reddish-brown rust I study the page for echoes. What is it about this poem that earns it that rust mark? “Ah, yes.”

And then the fire. 

All those dog-eared, paperclipped, pencil marked, notes to- think-about-later, pages, resting in treasured books , and books sitting on the to-be-read stack, all of those words, ash.

It would be easy to grow all mawkish over my lost and only remembered volumes, except I know life, and libraries, begin anew. 

One day, one volume at a time. It gets better.

It got better for me in a hurry when Richard Vargas mailed me a copy of his newest book, The Screw City Poems, a compendium of work spanning the poet’s career since 2005 and including work in progress.

I remember these poems. It’s as if all my poetry books have risen from the ashes of the Eaton Fire.

One of the better features of the collection is its twenty-seven selections from the out-of-print classic, McLife, whose title poems established the young Vargas as a powerful voice for anonymous working stiffs in lousy jobs.

With such a rich body of work to choose from, it's not entirely disappointing that Vargas didn’t include this that or another title, especially two from Guernica, revisited, “When You Beat Me, for Occupy,” and “Why I Feed the Birds.” Thanks to Jesus Treviño’s Latinopia, we can enjoy Richard Vargas reading those two wonderful poems.

Here's a link to the video: 

http://latinopia.com/latino-literature/latinopia-word-richard-garcia-guernica-revisited/

 

Here’s a link to Thelma Reyna’s incisive review of Leaving A Tip At the Blue Moon Motel.

https://labloga.blogspot.com/2023/08/return-of-backyard-floricanto-richard.html

I cannot hope to recreate my incinerated library nor recover anything material that was lost. That what memory’s for. With The Screw City Poems, Richard Vargas has ignited my memory--in the best way—of all of those books of his that burned. I’m glad to hold this slim volume in my hands with its selection of work from those books of mine that vanished in smoke. I read and dog-ear as if these poems are mine for the very first time and go, “Ah, yes…”