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Loading... Beast Meridian (edition 2017)by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (Author)
Work InformationBeast Meridian by Vanessa Angelica Villarreal
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. This book was tough for me. Sarah picked it for my Poetry Seminar to read. It’s one of the most exciting books of poetry I’ve read in its use of the page but nothing connects...it feels like streams of language. I just can’t find that radical. Or I can. I can’t make myself radical enough to connect with it. The recurring images and the ideas of the book are so great but I just can’t gain the access I crave as a reader. A Field of Onions: Brown Study is one of the best poems I’ve read in recent years though. ( ) no reviews | add a review
Narrates the first- generation Mexican American girl, tracking the experiences of cultural displacement, the inheritance of generational trauma, sexist and racist violence, sexual assault, economic struggle, and institutional racism and sexism that disproportionately punishes brown girls in crisis. Narrated by a speaker in mourning marked as an at- risk juvenile, psychologically troubled, an offender, expelled and sent to alternative school for adolescents with behavioral issues, and eventually, a psychiatric hospital, it survives the school to prison pipeline, the immigrant working class condition, grueling low- pay service jobs, conservative classism against Latinxs in Texas, queerness, assimilation, and life wrapped up in frivolous citations, fines, and penalties. The traumatic catalyst for the long line of trouble begins with the death of a beloved young grandmother from preventable cervical cancer--another violence of systemic racism and sexism that prevents regular reproductive and sexual health care to poor immigrant communities--and the subsequent deaths of other immigrant family members who are mourned in the dissociative states amidst the depressive trauma that opens the book. The dissociative states that mark the middle--a surreal kind of shadowland where the narrator encounters her animal self and ancestors imagined as animals faces brutal surreal challenges on the way back to life beyond trauma--is a kind of mictlan, reimagined as a state of constant mourning that challenges American notions of "healing" from trauma, and rather acknowledges sadness, mourning, and memory as a necessary state of constant awareness to forge a "way back" toward a broader healing of earth, time, body, history -- Provided by the publisher. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)811.6Literature English (North America) American poetry 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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