FlowerSong Press

The premise alone of “Quarantine Highway,” (Flowersong Press, Oct. 2022) the latest collection of poetry by Millicent Borges Accardi, is well worth the price of admission ‒ which is only about $16 right now on the Flowersong Press website.

The 68-poem collection, written during the early and mid-months of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, records and examines the shared sense of fear, isolation and uncertainty that many of us nonessential workers, forced to socially distance, would experience for up to a year or more of working from home, home schooling or just sheltering in place.

The book itself emerged from a 30-by-30 writing challenge put to past and present CantoMundistas, AKA fellows of CantoMundo, a national poetry organization since 2009 who, according to its website, “cultivates a community of Latinx poets through workshops, symposia, public readings, and publications.” Accardi’s work here, intentional artifacts, were prompted by readings and themes influenced and initiated by this tightknit literary community who met regularly on Zoom to challenge, collaborate, inspire each other, and to help confront and navigate their forced isolation together with their shared love of poetry and reading, and the healing and safety of their strong connections (personally, professionally, and digitally). What a magnificent experiment and premise for a book of poetry!

One of my favorite poems in the book is “Bread,” which not only sets the stage for the dreaded “new normal” of our world plus social distancing, but it also highlights the vivid imagery, repetition, and surprising wordplay that feature in the best of Accardi’s work throughout the book.

In “Bread,” the speaker opens by telling us what we already “know, knew / know, known…”; that it was all just a big gamble, just a bet we all made “hoping for a last breaking of luck / before the world ran out.” Do you remember making that same bet before braving empty-shelved grocery stores, armed with only “sanitizer and hope,” trying to stock up on anything and everything (even toilet paper) our families might possibly need before “…life was forbidden and / everyone was an enemy”? Because I sure do.

This poem also brings up other important themes explored throughout the book: rampant misinformation from the media, new levels of political upheaval, and the growing divide (both physically and politically) between us and them.

“We were television-glued / as news rolled by and the rooms / misled us into doing the nonsense / we knew we shouldn’t:/ over-drinking, board games, /chanting curses at each other.”

Accardi’s use of first-person plural here, and in many of the subsequent poems in this collection, is a bold choice that clearly demonstrates, to me, the poet’s intention, despite its subject matter, to push past this hate in the time of the ‘rona to a much healthier and more productive place of hope, healing, self-reflection and the reckoning we all so sorely needed.

^{Listen to “Bread” read by the author}

In “Bread,” a familiar cadence or rhythm also recalled for me the opening bit to T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land” – and, considering the subject matter, it makes a lot of sense now. Accardi’s word choice and placement of “breaking…” “betting…” “binding…” and “bleeding” echoes the “breeding…” “mixing…” “stirring…” and “feeding…” from Eliot’s seminal Modernist work. And this was just one of many poems in the book that had me Googling other poets and books for hours and hours as I willingly dove down into literary rabbit holes of inspired reading and learning.

I talked to Accardi about “Bread,” and how much I liked it and all the allusions to other poets and their work. I shared with her that, for me, poetry has always been a kind of cosmic conversation between poets over time and space – and that this mystical feeling came over me quite a bit while I was reading her book and all the amazing writers her work references. I asked about her own objectives or goals when it came to writing her poetry.

“I write to try to make sense of the world,” she said, “to piece things
together in my own mind. I write to learn and to research. I write to
keep me sane.”

She told me, whether she was ranting or mumbling, celebrating or complaining, her writing is about vocalizing change and starting a conversation that could, ultimately, effect change.

I should point out that not all the poems in “Quarantine Highway” are specifically about COVID-19, like “Bread.” In fact, most of the poems, as part of the 30-by-30 writing challenge, are direct responses, written under the specter of the global pandemic, to specific poetry prompts: words, phrases or titles of poems, books, and songs.

In the second half of the book, the poet also takes on one of COVID-19’s favorite targets: immigrants and immigration. A proud Portuguese American, Accardi examines her own heritage in much of her writing, and “Quarantine Highway” is no different, especially themes concerning the loss, discovery, claiming, and reclaiming of identity.

In “With Cascading, Iron Straight Hair,” we get all three of the book’s interesting elements in one playful yet poignant poem about a young immigrant teen’s cultural assimilation. “Slathering on lye from an orange jar…” to straighten out her “Portuguese Frizz waves…” in “a divorce of emotions between what /” she sees in the locker and who she sees far away “in the pages of Seventeen magazine…” which the poet calls “a catalogue of friends…” she “could never connect with…”

Composed after a line from “Heirlooms” by Luivette Resto, a Puerto Rican poet and CantoMundo fellow, this piece offers a hopeful “ever-present relief” from what seems a painful personal moment, a “charm of sweet conflict…” as true as true can be.

In “Unlearning America’s Languages” (on a theme by, “Lowering Your Standards for Food Stamps” by Sheryl Luna), another seemingly young voice tells us how her own generation “…form-fitted into a dress of forgetting / language culture, food, Fit in Fit in Fit in / disappear into America…” We learn that their “Parents came to California to rise above / blending inside a fairytale Knott’s Berry Farm…” Finally, the poem ends with devastating (yet still hopeful) image that left me shook and shaken like one of our infamous LA tremors:

            “…Tell the counselors you will ride the bus
                and stave off the earthquakes, embracing a future
                that does not resemble any past you heard whispered
                and fought about at night after bedtime, where
                we lie in bed and draw words in the air, spelling
                out where we came from.

This book easily could’ve taken a much darker turn were it not for that bit of hope in this and other insightful poems in the collection. Accardi made sure to remind us throughout the book that, while hope may be free, real change has a very high and very real cost – it’s the pain, struggle, the fight, the fear, the anxiety, the potential and actual loss of identity, of self, of life, of limb, and of who we are and where we might and might not Fit in Fit in Fit in the world. Most importantly, we see that change, while often imperceptibly slow in the real world, can possibly accelerate through self-reflection, creativity, community, compassion, generosity, art, music, and – dammit, yes – the wise words of poetry!

I asked Accardi who influenced her writing and this hopeful view of her art. I was not surprised when her short list was made up of mostly educators and librarians, her parents and her amazing fellow fellows at CantoMundo. But there was one name on the list that really got my attention: Mrs. Virtue, her first-grade teacher.

Mrs. Virtue wasn’t just any teacher; she was that teacher for Accardi, the one who really left her mark. “Her dad was a poet,” Accardi said, “and she read us poems in class which I am sure were not part of the curriculum.” It turns out Mrs. Virtue’s dad wasn’t just any old poet. Her dad was Claude McKay, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

I couldn’t help but recall a poem about Mrs. Virtue in “Quarantine Highway” called “The Truth would be from a Line” (inspired by Gastão Cruz) that I now knew I’d misread, and which I suddenly realized, I’d clearly misinterpreted as well.

Mrs. Virtue wasn’t a poetic personification of virtue or even some positive educator in general; she was an actual and important person from the poet’s real life. The poem discusses “…an old phrase, / like a poem dealing with / trees I memorized, along with everyone / else in Mrs. Virtue’s first grade [class] / at Luther Burbank…” This line, which would “…require / more sense than this crazy crisis / we are going through presently…” was the truth – the whole truth:

            “For truth would have
              to be untouchable,
              like a hand we used to know,
              to hold –
              as if it were our own –
              the left reaching
              for the right, fumbling along thru
              this magnificent universe we kind of
              know, or at least pretended it to be so.”

This was interesting to me because, while I was reading “Quarantine Highway” for this review, my 8-year-old daughter, struck by the colorful cover art by Ralph Almeida, asked me what the book I was reading was about. I told her it was a poetry book written during the pandemic, which captured her attention. The pandemic is easily the biggest historical event of her young life so far. So, we talked about that difficult time for a little while when she suddenly asked me a question I didn’t know how to answer. Is poetry fiction or non-fiction?

I brought this up to Accardi, and she agreed that it might be an impossible question to answer properly, especially to my 8-year-old daughter. She then recalled how surprised she was one day when she went looking for poetry books at the Alamitos Library in Long Beach, her home-away-from-home as a child and discovered that the poetry books were stored in the non-fiction section. “Poetry was deep in the trenches between biographies and chemistry,” she said. “It made no sense to me.”

In the end, neither of us was sure which was which. And while Accardi gave me an answer for me to share with my daughter, I think I should end this review by sharing that answer here as well. Not only because I like her answer, but because I think it accurately represents what “Quarantine Highway,” the latest poetry collection by Millicent Borges Accardi is really about.

“My final answer is both,” she said. “With poetry, we write about
the truth that is sometimes too painful to speak or mention unless
it is couched in fairy tales, made-up characters, and lessons learned
by strangers, so as not to harm the innocent and to make the
truth easier to take.”

Quarantine Highway by Millicent Borges Accardi is available now from Flowersong Press.

Frank Mundo is a poet from Los Angeles. His latest chapbooks are Touched by an Anglo (Kattywompus Press) and Eleven Sundry Flowers (Antrim House).

Poetry by Matt Sedillo
Review by Frank Mundo

I was watching Disney’s “Encanto” with the kids when the mail arrived with Matt Sedillo’s new book of poetry, “City on the Second Floor” from FlowerSong Press, and I thought, how perfect is that? Here’s Matt Sedillo, extremely popular Chicano political poet, essayist, activist (the hardest working poet I know) – and yet somehow he’s become like the Bruno of certain parts of the Los Angeles poetry scene. His poetry superpower is so electric and engaging that most are absolutely dazzled and inspired by his voice, while the rest are left frightened (even triggered) and dismissive of his ostensibly dark and angry premonitions. Plus, he’s a troll, they say. He’s a communist with Das Kapital C. He’s (God forbid) a renegade. Self-taught? He didn’t even go to college.

Maybe that’s why, despite all he’s done for the poetry community in Los Angeles for a dozen years or so, we haven’t seen even a mention of Sedillo (or his three books) in the LA Times since he won the L.A. Grand Slam championship in 2011. Perhaps that’s why, no matter how hard he works and finds success, he’s never been the poet in conversation at Rattle. And, maybe it’s why, like his second book, “Mowing Leaves of Grass,” his newest book will likely never be reviewed or discussed by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Maybe it’s just me, but, in certain parts of Los Angeles, it seems we don’t talk about Matt Sedillo – at least, not nearly as much as we should. And I just don’t understand why. Many compare him to Amiri Baraka, Jose Montoya, and so many other fiery or political poets. To me, his work is a cross between Allen Ginsberg and Wanda Coleman. So why isn’t everyone in LA talking about his new book, “City on the Second Floor,” which is flying off the shelves, by the way.

One criticism you’ll hear way too often is that Sedillo’s poetry is too angry. This is a lazy and shallow reading (or listening) of his work. Yes, there is anger in his poetry, and a lot of it, but it’s almost always tempered with humor, which can never be done effectively without empathy and compassion. Sedillo’s speaker addresses this idea in “Post,” the very first poem of the 32 poems and one play collected in “City on the Second Floor.” And I can almost guarantee that Sedillo or his publisher placed this piece first in the collection intentionally. There’s no way this was a coincidence.

“Post” begins looking back (even reminiscing, you might say) to a time of the service economy (when what? America was great?) – “…just like yesterday/ Municipalities raised cities/ Built nuclear families/ Associations of sturdy pockets/ A two-car garage, chicken in every pot.” What follows is their broken promise of tomorrow, “…which doesn’t show up all at once,” the speaker tells us, “But when it does…” it’s with liquidated pensions and automated factories – and the resulting gig economy left in a shambles to a generation who “…cannot afford to live in…” the very cities where they must hustle only to get part-time, freelance, contract, and “adjunct” employment. “Promise me the world, then show me the door,” Sedillo’s speaker concludes. “I was not/ Born/ Angry/ I was abandoned.”

Yet, even with that last line, as justifiable as the “anger” might be for this speaker (and Sedillo’s generation), I think a lot of critics who only want to see anger will miss the fabulous punchline at the end of the poem – “Tell me the one/ Where I killed the economy.”

I love this line, not only because it’s hilarious, but because it’s so accurate. Often accused of being whiners and lazy, Millennials are also blamed somehow for ruining the very broken economy they inherited. But I would argue that there’s nothing overly angry in this line. This is not an “OK, Boomer” sarcastic snowflake moment. This is more of a mic-drop moment – a humorous wink and a nod to the “us” in the us-versus-them structure that makes up so much of Sedillo’s poetry.

Even the title “Post” is a funny play on words of old versus new. Is this the postindustrial standard? Is this a letter? A social media post? Is this a signpost? Or is it a warning, like so many other poems in the collection about how consumerism, credit, and debt will ruin us all? Maybe it’s all these things and a hint of what to expect in the following pages of an angry and funny and compassionate collection.
Sedillo reworks this poem later in the book (sort of in reverse) in a poem called, “Hammurabi,” which is laugh-out-loud funny. This one ends with a deadly serious punchline, “Since they from on high/ Convinced us down below/ That we/ Ever/ Needed/ Their/ Code/ Of law/ To tell us/ We were free.” What’s funny is that the lies about the future in this remix of “Post” come from the TV characters we so loved and trusted: Lucy Ricardo, Mr. Belvedere, Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin, and especially Al Bundy (all comedies, mind you) who convinced us that we “…could raise a family/ In a two story/ On the single income/ Of a shoe salesman.” LOL.

I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t the only one who believed Matt Sedillo’s poetry is as funny as it is angry. Maybe I just have a dark sense of humor. So, I called up Mike “the Poet” Sonksen, a poet, scholar, journalist, critic, mentor, and author with an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of poetry in Los Angeles. I respect Mike’s opinion so much because he focuses on poetry of merit, not simply the styles and genres he prefers. If anyone anywhere in LA is writing or “spitting” quality verse, he knows about it, writes about it, talks about – because he’s all about it and has been for 25 years.

“Matt Sedillo is relentless,” Mike told me. “He’s a student of history and skilled at spinning his astute understanding into engaging poetry,” and I couldn’t agree more. He also said, “Sedillo can also be quite funny, satirizing the powers that be with poetic one-liners. His social commentary balances truth and wit to produce a poetic velocity faster than Starsky & Hutch.”

Another poem I loved from the book, “Pope of Broadway,” literally starts as a classic joke: “An Arab, an Italian, a Jew, a Puerto Rican, an Inuit, an American Indian, a Mongolian/ And a Mexican/ Walk into a bar…” and “Anthony Quinn orders a drink.” This is a wonderful and complex poem about the “ethnically ambiguous” actors (the “every” Brown-man) in Hollywood, from Quinn (who was the best) to today’s other “two first-name” actors who continue this unusual tradition today, including Cliff Curtis and Oscar Isaac.

I like this poem also because I spoke about this concept (and the larger and darker meaning behind it) with Matt Sedillo a couple years ago, before he had written the piece. And reading the final product in his new book was a real treat for me.

That day, I also asked Matt what his goal was when writing a poem. “First,” he said, “it’s to satisfy the demands of structure.” Matt often uses a three-act structure that he has developed and refined over the years and made his own. It’s one of the major topics he discusses and often teaches as a highly in-demand speaker/performer at the top colleges and universities in America and at several other major venues in Canada, England, and Cuba. “Second,” Matt continued, “no matter what the theme is, I want to write poems (not every time, but I try) that are calls to action.” It’s not surprising to me that his answer is all about craft. Matt sees craft everywhere. He studies it and looks for patterns and anomalies in everything. He’ll read texts or study videos of fiery speakers, like Hugo Chavez and Michael Parenti, and spend hours breaking down their prose, examining what they say and how they say it. He’ll study the timing of stand-up comics, books, films, commercials, anything that tells stories in an engaging way that gets people to act.

In “Mowing Leaves of Grass,” Sedillo’s first book with FlowerSong Press from 2019, his craft, especially his three-act structure is in full effect. It’s the work that put him on the map as a unique and powerful voice in Los Angeles and beyond. The poems in his latest book, “City on the Second Floor,” however, offer a glimpse, I believe, of where his poetry is headed: even more powerful, political, angry, funny, timely, smart, carefully crafted, and compassionate calls to action.

I also asked Matt Sedillo who influences him and his writing, and I was a little surprised by his answer. An avid student of history, Matt listed artists who are still alive and very active in the community. He said Luis J. Rodriguez, the 2014 Los Angeles Poet Laureate. He also mentioned other poets whose work inspired him: spoken word artist David A. Romero, author of “My Name is Romero,” and Viva Padilla, Publisher/ Editor-in-Chief of Dryland, a literary journal.

Finally, I wanted to know about Matt Sedillo’s publisher, so I contacted Edward Vidaurre, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of FlowerSong Press, and I asked him straight out why he chose to publish such an outspoken and, perhaps, controversial poet as Matt Sedillo. Without hesitation, Vidaurre answered, “Because, like me, he is fearless about his work. He’s a necessary voice in a world where being an activist is sometimes looked on as trouble.” Finally, he added – and it all made perfect sense to me – “I wanted his collection to make noise and open eyes.”

I suppose the gatekeepers and kingmakers of the Los Angeles literary scene will do what they want to do – and they still might not talk about Matt Sedillo after my little plea here. But, with Sedillo’s incredible work ethic, his determination and dedication to craft, and his fearless and supportive publisher’s commitment to sharing “necessary” voices and books, I know we will definitely be hearing much more “noise” from him.

City on the Second Floor is available now from FlowerSong Press.

Frank Mundo is a poet from Los Angeles. His latest chapbooks are Touched by an Anglo (Kattywompus Press) and Eleven Sundry Flowers (Antrim House).

Quarantine Highway by Millicent Borges Accardi

City on the Second Floor