Guest Review: Foxholes by Azalea Aguilar

La Bloga-Tuesday welcomes the return of guest critic, Rey Rodriguez, with an appreciation of Azalea Aguilar's poetry. Rodriguez has shared critiques and observations on a variety of works, most recently a film by Anne Lewis and Laura Varela, Un Trip: raúlsalinas & the poetry of liberation (link). and earlier, Vincent Cooper's Infidelis (link).

Review: Azalea Aguilar. Foxhole. Los Angeles: Bottlecap Press, 2025.

Rey Rodriguez. 

Azalea Aguilar’s new chapbook, Foxhole, explodes onto the stage as only a Chicana from South Texas can with brutal truth, grace, and love as she describes the reality of growing up with complicated family members and friends, who, despite being flawed, deserve all of the heart that Aguilar leaves on the page.

 

From her opening poem, “Forever in a Foxhole,” I was entranced by Aguilar’s honesty and economy of words to paint a world that many children experience of an alcoholic, aggressive father and a mother who is doing her best to love and shelter her family, including her two daughters, from the violence. Aguilar ends the poem with the haunting line, “One year fearing for your life in a jungle. Forever in a foxhole with your family.”

 

With her first poem, Aguilar grips the reader and compels them to keep reading to join her in this foxhole and share all she learned from this experience. She defines a foxhole as “a hole in the ground used by troops as shelter against enemy fire or as a firing point; a place of refuge or concealment.” 

 

While reading each of her poems, we feel what it is like to live in that foxhole. From the brutality that she describes in “Forever in a Foxhole” where she writes, “Still he pummels her to the floor. Who the fuck are you, he whispers in her ear, a hand over her mouth,” to the promise that is asked of the daughter by her father in “I Was Once a Whisper,” when he says, “don’t ever ask me to stop drinking, ok, never ask me and you can stay.”

 

These intimate events and words draw the reader into the moment, and we begin to live in the foxhole with all of these fully drawn characters. And yet this is not a chapbook of despair or judgment. Aguilar is able to hold these people with love and grace within the vessel of these poems and present them to the world for who they are —- flawed people trying to do the best they can, given the limitations of a broken system that traps them in poverty, toxic masculinity, and alcoholism. 

 

“Comouflaged” is an example of hope through the love of one sister for another. Aguilar’s last stanza in the poem says:

 

                                                I feel your eyes staring at me now

                                                searching for the little girl

                                                I’m here because of you

                                                because you believed

                                                one day you will leave this place

 

Despite trauma, there is hope we will escape this nightmare of hate and abuse and that we will leave this foxhole. Ultimately, the path to doing so is by seeking beauty even in the darkest places.

 

Aguilar closes the last poem of the chapbook, “Wildflowers” with the stanza:

                                                

                                                Maybe it was just a picture

                                                            but I remember / my father’s hands

                                                            his hands in a field of flowers

 

                                                Pointing me toward beauty.

 

This last line informs all that everyone has something to teach, even those who are so easily demonized, if we will only seek beauty. 

 

I hope you will all celebrate and support Aguilar by buying her book and joining her in her foxhole. You won’t be disappointed, and if you are as fortunate as I am, you may even let her lyrics point you toward beauty. 

 

 

About Rey Rodriguez:

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a poetry book inspired by a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He participated in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a second-year fiction writing MFA student at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Corner, Full Stop, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review. He is a graduate of Cornell, Princeton, and U.C. Berkeley Law School.