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Sibling Rivalry Press

Book Review

Othered

by on September 25, 2018

Othered, by Randi Romo
Review by Stacy Pendergrast

 

To read Randi Romo’s Othered is to share both the grief and resilience of one woman who has been “othered” — as a Xicana, a queer, a sex abuse survivor, a former farmworker, an activist, and a Southerner — and whose loved ones have also likewise suffered. This book of 28 poems features the kind of writing that can only be wrought from deeply-lived, traumatic experiences as well as from a lifetime of brave responses.

Know that Romo is a woman of feeling and passionate words, but she is just as much a woman of action.   Fifteen years ago, she co-founded the Center for Artistic Revolution (CAR) in Arkansas, an LGBTQ civil rights organization named by the marginalized kids whom she mentored and for whom she still fights. In a 2015 interview with the Arkansas Times, Romo discussed her motive to make more Arkansans advocates for LGBTQ issues. She said, “It’s true, there are some that will never shift, but it’s the greater movable middle that now finds itself increasingly having to consider the real impact of homo/transphobia on their fellow Arkansans.”  With her new collected works, perhaps Romo has now lifted her voice in her greatest rallying cry for those whom she defends, and it is likely that her message will reach far beyond her state.

From the moment we view the collage of protest images on the book’s cover, we brace ourselves. In his introduction, publisher Bryan Borland prepares us further when he tells us that Romo writes on behalf of those voices that have been silenced. Borland says, “Sometimes those voices belong to kids she’s had a hand in saving.  Sometimes those voices belong to kids who couldn’t be saved, even with her best efforts.”  Tragically, two poems serve as epitaphs for two of those victimized for being different. Most heartbreakingly, Romo dedicates the book to her daughter “whose life was deeply impacted by the penalties of otherness and who paid the ultimate price, with her life.”

Indeed, the poems deliver on our expectations to be disturbed. In “Coming Out” we learn that the response to the young Romo’s revealed sexuality was for her to be sent away for gay conversion therapy, where even after she was put through “queer exorcisms,”  she proudly “stayed out.”  In  “Planting Season,” Romo reveals the tragic plight of migrant workers (she was one) who are exposed to a deadly gas as they work the strawberry fields. The poem “I Remember” gives us Romo’s wrenching account of how she endured multiple counts of sexual abuse, and how she learned to “sleep in boots jeans sharp-edged knife.” She effectively haunts us with the repetitive ending lines:  “Not a one of these things happened in a public bathroom.”

It is as if Romo takes all those years of compiled suppression, bullying, and abuse, and — with the natural focus of a child who works a play dough squeeze machine — kneads her compacted clay of pain, then leans on the lever of language so that her poems come oozing out, brilliantly colored and exquisitely molded.

The overarching theme of this collection is victorious affirmation in the face of relentless oppression and violence. However, there is tremendous range, and the reader is also relieved and brightened by Romo’s lighter tones, including her breaks for humor.  There is the playful “Bless Your Heart” from the perspective of the young poet, the child of a “Mexican mama / and a white daddy,” who is both charmed and befuddled by the whimsy of Southern expressions.  In the fantastical “Step-Sister’s Lament,” the girl-narrator at Cinderella’s ball imagines her mother’s reaction to her being the suitor of a princess instead of a prince.  To our delight, we revisit our own adolescent celebrity infatuations as we read  “Fan Letter to Hedy LaMarr.” No matter the gender of the one we crushed upon, we recognize the fluttering thrill in the words of the teen moving toward her star on the TV screen.  The poet says, “… so close I could touch you / and I wanted to / and it terrified me / and it exhilarated me / and I knew something was forever changed on / a Saturday afternoon …”

Perhaps the flashes of quiet angst best highlight the gift of Romo. Indeed, where she shows us how she fights back against bigotry, we admire her guts and wonder if we could muster an equivalent courage.  But it is in the calmer universal moments that she often appeals to our sense of sameness with her.  After all, as social beings, we fear being outcast or marginalized. This poet portrays pangs that strike deeply in all of us.

 

Othered is available now through Sibling Rivalry Press.

Last year Stacy Pendergrast was awarded the Nan Snow Emerging Writer Award given on the occasion of the CD Wright Women Writers Conference at the University of Central Arkansas.  She is a teaching artist in Arkansas. Follow her writing and teaching blogs at www.stacypendergrast.com.
Book Review

Tertulia

by on August 22, 2017

Chapbook by Seth Pennington
Review by John Venegas

Let’s get something sorted out before we get started: you are a mind, a soul if you want, spinning in circles on the skin of a planet that is spinning in circles in the grip of a star that is spinning in circles with a horde of its siblings that are moving inconceivably fast through the universe. Does that give you vertigo? Lovecraftian dread? Can you imagine that mind, your mind, being pulled along by an impossibly circuitous current, given the flickering light of consciousness to try and amass some semblance of a personal picture of everything? We all deal with this, one way or another. Some accept it. Some are fascinated, terrified, or confused, or some combination of the three. Some stick their head in the stand and wait for it to end. I didn’t imagine that I would find a beautiful, touching, and measured response to these ideas in a tiny little chapbook. But, thanks to Seth Pennington, I am very much enjoying being proven wrong.

To be clear, the poetry chapbook Tertulia is no heady science fiction romp. It is a text that embeds itself in the deeply, often uncomfortably personal. It spends little time staring up at the stars, dreaming, instead wading into a river of sensation and emotion that it is not entirely sure it will be able to emerge from. Tertulia looks at the microcosms, the reflections of the impossible vastness that can be found within the people that we love, the people that we hate, and the people to which we never give any thought. When you hear writers talk about getting into the flow, it is usually in reference to some flood of genius that compels them to write. Such an idea is romanticized and dramatized to no end, but here, in my opinion, is evidence of the real thing – an experience of flow for the intense, frightening thing it can be.

a new leg and terror at living with death
having been so certain, more certain than
any other day’s death you had

known. The blue on your lawn, it’s lying
so light the green is showing through,
as if color could be purer

This is fascinating use of spacing and structure, in a way that, intentional or not, encapsulates the experience and potential of writing poetry. For me, the power of the stanza break is critical. The pause, the holding of breath, feels as though the speaker is hesitating, waiting for something. When combined with the subjects under discussion, it is as if the speaker is afraid after having invoked death while simultaneously dealing with an array of color that feels unnatural. The speaker is giving us glimpses, moments in time and space that can only be conveyed through words. The chapbook is full of moments like this, where not an ounce of space is wasted and the fat is trimmed away. The speaker seems to be giving us only what is most important in the moment, be it the smell of sweat or the sight of aging pendulous breasts or the taste of dirt and forgotten lovers. It is precise poetry that knows how to hide its seams.

With the word choice and structure being so specific, it is little wonder that the language works exceedingly well. I found myself feeling genuinely guilty as I read, because there were several moments where the quality of the word play had me grinning like an idiot or marveling at the taste in my mouth, only to realize or remember that the thing being described was tragic or solemn. It’s like seeing a beautiful person at a funeral and forgetting where you are for a long moment.

Your family finds you bent over beyond your
breasts, the silver hair of your lip wet with
effort, with violent prayerfuls of sweat. And finally
when you move to speak, only dirt can
all from your mouth –
your wanting to taste him.

My choices of excerpts aside, there is far more than only lament. A tertulia is a gathering, often of artists, for the purposes of discussion and, while I cannot be certain that the title was chose for this reason, it is at least quite the coincidence that we see a wide array of passions on display. Lovers thirst and reassure. Families reminisce and bicker. Friends are born and multiply. As the current drags you, the reader, further and further out in the water and feeds you glimpses of lives, of moments, you can see the pattern, the echoes of answers to those questions of mortality and time and legacy and impermanence. This little chapbook does what often takes the whole of novels and compendiums, touching that deepest spark in all of us and reminding us to open out eyes and see.

 

Tertulia is available now through Sibling Rivalry Press.