Nothing is as it seems in Carribean Fragoza's debut collection, Eat the Mouth that Feeds You. Writing in the traditions of magic realism and gothic literature, Fragoza has a gift for introducing a symbol at the beginning of a short story and allowing readers to linger on its distortion by the end. "Tortillas Burning" is about a young mother experiencing poverty and abuse, whose homemade tortillas stand in as evidence of her reclamation as she leaves Mexico for the United States.
Though these 10 stories home in on different characters, the experience of being a woman--especially a poor or working-class woman--in a world rife with discrimination and gender violence emerges as a through line in the transnational collection. Fragoza endows characters with specific sights, smells and histories that place readers inside an unfolding scene--even unnamed characters like the girl trying to help support her family by working at an upscale cosmetics store in "Crystal Palace," or the woman in "The Vicious Ladies," who, upon returning to her hometown from college, falls in with the same crowd from middle school, despite always feeling out of place among them.
One of the most surreal in the collection is the title story, which features a woman grappling with her daughter's devouring of her body, a commentary on the transfer of matriarchal and immigrant knowledge from one generation to the next. With winding plots and searing metaphors like this, Eat the Mouth that Feeds You expands and solidifies the Latinx literature canon. --Gwen Aviles, freelance writer