Santa Tarantula

In her intrepid Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize-winning first collection of 45 poems, Santa Tarantula, Jordan Pérez reflects on the Cuban American experience and dramatizes the dangers faced by women and queer people.

"The Masculinity Camps" and "Mixed-Up Sestina" recall the harsh conditions at Castro's labor camps, where punishment--often with bayonets--was meted out for sexual nonconformity: "Gay men and maybe-gay men and dissidents/ were sent. The national ballet lost ten, many priests/ were rounded up, writers. My grandfather, yes."

Pérez, who works in childhood sexual abuse prevention, forthrightly portrays the omnipresent risks to women's bodies. "My mother tells me my body is a temple./ I always forget about temples, unless a man/ is burning one in the news," she writes. "Deadgirl" charts how a nebulous threat can become universal: "I couldn't be sure/ which house in the neighborhood held the man/ who touched little girls, and so in every house/ is the man who touches little girls."

Pérez alternates historical and contemporary settings with ease. Several biblical matriarchs who were wronged by men give voice to poems as monologues--among them Delilah, Gomer, and Tamar, whose father-in-law, Judah, mistook her for a prostitute. Nature imagery and alliteration--ocean and rock, flowers and fruit--often overlay a peaceful patina onto gritty subject matter. In the title poem, the speaker hails a spider as a saint: "Now we praise her, her soft scopulae/ for scaling glass, her silk spinnerets, always/ reaching." Sibilance turns menacing in other contexts: "the shoreline,/ as abrupt as the silence after a scream."

Pérez calls nature as a witness to exploitation in this boldly feminist debut. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck

Powered by: Xtenit