Beast Meridian

Vanessa Angélica Villareal’s book Beast Meridian stands out to me visually in so many ways. Unlike the other books I’ve ordered for this class, I was surprised when I took this one out of it’s mailer envelope and saw its size and shape. It isn’t compact like so many poetry books are, it is bigger and flatter like a magazine or a children’s book. Then, it also has photos in it. A book with pictures! It made me think of Morgan Parker’s comments at her reading about how poetry is actually such a flexible form, if you allow it to be. Why shouldn’t a poetry book have photos in it? I thought for a long time that literature and words were solely intellectual and therefore very separate from visual language like photography, art, film, etc. I love works that complicate this and combine multiple art forms like this. Lastly, many of the poems take very interesting forms on the page. Many are punctuated with slashes (mirroring the book cover) and many are strewn across the page, spread out in unexpected ways (like “Cardinals, A Novela”, on page 43, which seems to flow from the top left corner and pool at the bottom of the page). “Malinche” has a whole blank square inside of it, which completely disrupts the otherwise tightly packed words, making it extra disjointed and hard to read (15). Some poems, like “Malinalli” (70), seem to be the reverse. They have a poem packed into a small box on the big, white page, or on the facing page, a small column on the left of the page. Gaps in the text leave little bubbles on the page, the pauses lining up to almost form a path, but not quite.

“Assimilation Rooms” stands out to me. Perhaps because it is a little more obviously narrative and linear than some of the other more abstract poems that I struggled with a bit. I noticed right away that the first paragraph is mostly in spanish and that the spanish text is all a lighter grey, very stand-outish. Throughout the poem we get little glimpses into the American cultural assimilation process. It is scary and maddening. The speaker starts out speaking in Spanish, with only a few words and sentence fragments in English (which appear in bold). Below is a footnote with the English translation. For the English-only-speaking reader, the fact that this poem starts in Spanish gives the reader the experience of being confused, othered, relegated to the footnotes. At the same time the poem itself is about the speaker being lost and confused in an American school, not understanding the things her classmates yelled at her.

Pages 30-38 seem to go together (or maybe even 25-38) in that they deal with how the pressures of assimilation shape a person and affect their mental health. The treatment of footnotes throughout these poems paired with medical psychological jargon sets the poem(s) up as a sort of psychological study. All at once it’s a critique of this assimilation process as dangerous, psychological warfare, but at the same time making it feel like the speaker (and other immigrants) are really being watched and studied, the objects of an experiment. This goes along with the “beast” the dehumanizing treatment of the non-white “other” that I felt as an undercurrent throughout the work. Also, the fact that the “final” assimilation room for the speaker is a psychiatric hospital is sort of scary. Although it is clear that pressure to assimilate and racism is what causes mental health problems, in framing the psych hospital as an agent of assimilation, it makes it seem not like a “cure” or a treatment, but another place to have ones “otherness” violently stripped from you. Throughout these poems assimilation rooms can be anything. A classroom, a closet in a kindergarten, a treatment center, the United States.

I also really thought the use of the definition of parallax (“the effect of position upon viewing an object”) was important, could be looked at as a thesis of this work in a way. The authors position (“when looking at an object”) is crucial. When she looks at white nipples in the locker room, she is looking at them from her position of not being white. She learns in school from her own position what is okay to sing and what is not. She learns she is an “other” and she learns to assimilate. Even later in the collection when the poems turn toward the ancestral, the reclaiming, maybe even healing, she is looking at that through her position and who she is shapes her vision.

So much more to say.Themes: womb, loss, grief, grandmother, ancestral trauma, lines (borders, meridians, liminal space, transition, migration), animals…