Stars and Assimilation in Beast Meridian

This book is big, and I mean it is 8x10 inches, and there are full page photographs in it so it feels like both a collection of poems and a photo album, both things that can be captured and things that can’t. This book is big, and I mean opening it is like opening a map of the sky, with millions of little dots connecting over time and space:

Draw a line through / our scattered bodies / the meadow reveals / our constellation

This is the entirety of Lopez, Praying Herd: Requiem. I love this poem for its spacing of each individual concept like stars that hold a bigger picture when viewed together. What we see when we look at stars is light from billions of years ago. The stars themselves don’t exist in the same time we do, they’re dead. But we can still see them, and that’s always struck me as very beautiful, and symbolic—that what we see and experience in our lives is created from and intimately connected to the past. Villarreal’s work, through its rich imagery of stars, pines, canyons, and beasts, plays a lot with connections to the past, her own past and the past of those who came before her all play out in one big book.

This connection to the past is especially important in confronting assimilation, which disconnects from everything, like being locked in a dark room. The series of poems: Assimilation Rooms, Assimilation Progress Report, and Gulf Pines, or Final Assimilation Room were very powerful to read, as with each poem, the violence and depersonalization of assimilation over time becomes more pronounced, from being locked in a classroom, to being locked in a mental hospital.

Villarreal includes footnotes in this section, which is notable as they’re typically only found in scientific writing and academic papers. “Citing your sources” is a way of asserting your expertise on a subject, a demonstration of your authority and adherence to institutional procedure. That Villarreal cites sources in poetry, in a huge blur of text on page 34, seems to ask how these papers, written by the same people who are responsible for inflicting the violence of assimilation on her, could have the power to say anything more about her experience than she can say in her own poetry:

“This association is purported to reflect, in part, the impact of negative experiences faced by immigrants in the process of assimilation, i.e. acculturative stressors. However, these findings can be explained by high levels of risk for psychiatric disorder among the US-born members of ethnic minority populations, who have both high risk for psychiatric disorders and high levels of acculturation relative to immigrants.”

Repeated over and over, blurred until indecipherable, mirroring psychological dissociation, the insanity of the assimilator seen by the assimilated, a challenge to ‘parallax’: the effect of position upon viewing an object.

“use parallax in / a poem       b minus”

“the tricks of English   tricks of the trade”