Reviews

The Women’s Review of Books

The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 20, Issue 2

American Book Review

Library Journal

ForeWord Magazine

Kirkus Reviews

Publishers Weekly

San Fransisco Chronicle

– Adrian Oktenberg, in The Women’s Review of Books, 2000/01/01

Finally, lesbian fiction and poetry have begun to move from the general to the specific. It’s only when a sufficient range of writing has been produced that we can begin to talk about a literature. Only now, when the basic territory has begun to be mapped, could a writer like Aleida Rodríguez appear. That is, she’s Lesbian. And she’s Hispanic (in this case, Cuban-American). While these facts are by no means to be minimized, they are the roots of her work. Its branches deserve to be called, simply, poetry.

Winner of the 1998 Morton Prize of Sarabande Books, chosen by Marilyn Hacker, Rodríguez’ Garden of Exile is a lush compendium. The snake in the grass is there as well, in the form of the trauma of exile. Rodríguez handles both lushness and trauma in a voice that is confident, relaxed matter-of-fact, honest, willing and truthful: recognizably "American." As she has lived in the U.S. for thirty years, one might expect her to have become acclimated. Early traumas have clearly been absorbed, though not forgotten. They persist, not as a jagged edge of pain, but as something that has become part of Rodríguez, that is. When she writes in a mixture of English and Spanish, it feels perfectly normal, the most natural thing in the world.

…with those long, pointed candies
the color of azúcar quemada
or following a straight line
along the water until we reached
la parte más remota de la playa
more sand than houses
las casas misteriosas
we imagined brujas or locos
lived in them
out here so far
("The Rosario Beach House," p. 56)

I, who lack even rudimentary Spanish, have no trouble at all.

Rodríguez’ preoccupation with language is the heart of this book. She speaks of the rice fields in her Cuban home town as "flooding the place of language." She is fascinated by the mystery of words, in whatever language. Perhaps because her lover at the time of writing was a painter, she treats us to a wonderful series of poems that explore differences between writing and painted. This confrontation forces her to make sense of her vocation to herself, and we are allowed to overhear. This is from "Plein Air":

I’d like to explain
how difficult it is to work with words.
A painter sits down and lines up
little tubes of color cleansed of context.
The autistic tubes in a row
utter nary a sentence, don’t waggle
with admonishment or squirm with shame.
There’s no fear their tiny silver mouths
will whisper fucking mustache or fat immigrant,
you never or I always or don’t.
No one has hissed cadmium yellow
or spat chrome oxide green
while walking out the door.…
Her materials are as forgiving as leaves,
which care not whether she says
detergent instead of iconoclast.
When she opens up the case,
the colors are all there exactly
as she left them, not dangling
between her and the checkout clerk.…
There should be such a box for writers,
filled with words brightly minted
but spared the smudge of circulation,
words denied to cruel, rapacious partners,
jealous coworkers, spin doctors, and ad copywriters.
Words one could pick up and squeeze
a little bit of on a palette, add
a splotch of medium and swirl
to just the right syrupy consistency.
Thus preserved, these words would sweep
the mind free of muddle, the sky of pollution… (pp. 34-35)

Even as she longs for a fresh, new, prelapsarian world of words, the poet knows that she dwells in a garden of exile.

Similarly, when Rodríguez writes about her Lesbian life, she does so with a knowing kind of charm. "Torch" is a brief falling-in-love saga whose narrator is unnerved and undone by someone whose phone message voice is "snappy as a women in thirties films":

…In her apartment, cigarette smoke monogrammed the air,
wafted like strands of hair into her eyes
when she leaned forward or cocked her head, whiskey in hand….

(p. 46)

Rodríguez is sophisticated stuff, equally at ease in several languages, landscapes, selves and forms of verse. She has used all the resources she needs to appear in this, her first book, as a poet fully formed and delightfully, deliciously readable.

– Ray González, in The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 20, Issue 2, 2000/01/03

Another Cuban-American poet has produced a startling book of poetry. After decades of conflict between Cuba and the U.S., the singular voices of Cuban exiles continue to record the poetic history of flight, renewal, and understanding. Rodríguez’ poems are narrative, yet move toward the prose poem form with lyrical ease.

– Elizabeth Grainger, in American Book Review, 2000/01/05

The Lexicon of Exile

What does it mean to be an exile? Literature offers us many models, from the Old Testament and Paradise Lost, to Assata Shakur’s political memoir and Edward Said’s autobiographical writings. Aleida Rodríguez’ first book of poetry, Garden of Exile, is remarkable among its contemporaries for its singular embrace of pleasure, of delight in the word and the image. It is multi-lingual, allusive, omnivorously sensual, and playfully formal, a treatise which embodies loss while also steadfastly incorporating love. It lacks entirely the self-important seriousness that characterizes so many first books, instead reveling in the pleasures of language. Rodríguez’s exile is literal—she left Cuba for the U.S. as a young girl. She’s made her imagined home a portable one, and provided its windows and doors. Her stanzas are rooms the reader wants to look into and live inside.

Garden of Exile begins with an excavation and a misrecognition. The poet’s initial discovery is emblematic of the work she does throughout: the object comes into view (in this case it is a small metal thing), and she describes it with precision and affection, speculating that it may be a bullet but handling it until she discovers its true nature. It is the far more feminine and artful crayon de labios—lipstick—complete with packaged scenes of exotic glamour. Visual precision and imaginative speculation are at the center of Rodríguez’ work, and in "Archaeology" she provides a crucial key for the reader: Things are not what they may at first appear to be. Usually they’re far more interesting, and with better art-direction:

Drawing yourself in, inventing yourself
as the world you know erases itself,
words wash over you and you can’t help
but think this one’s called "Atlantis," say, or "Pompeii."

Thus a rusted tube of lipstick becomes the relic of a lost past, an object whose suggestive powers is greater than its material confines. The magic is tempered with humor, and the promise of another world is reduced momentarily to a cosmetic’s commercial name. It’s refreshing to read a poet who has the ability to work so fluently in the magical and the real, and to display good timing in both.

In the double sonnet "Why I Would Rather Be a Painter" Rodríguez picks up the lyric where Frank O’Hara left it off in his "Why I Am Not a Painter." Neatly delineating an argument for the relative safety and sanity of painting over poetry, she suggests:

No beast
inhabits daubs of thalo green. But hint
at even such a word as love and I
am bent, like Sisyphus beneath the stone.
(I’d rather scrub the fungus from the tiles.)

There’s palpable affection here, for the painter in question and for both arts. The titular wish is an appropriate desire; these poems are marked with an interest in painting, references to painters and paintings, and a fierce devotion to the visual. The visual is real, and if it is necessarily transitory it is verifiable for the moment that it exists, but writing—"it is that thing, that Sense for Rent / of words that I despise." By swearing such fidelity to the visual image and seeming to critique the mutability of language, Rodríguez performs a good trick: she makes one believe in the veracity of her words while undermining the rhetoric that would otherwise mask their vulnerability. It’s a brave move, and one which is rewarded by the sureness of her poetics—and her engaging humor:

This pitch
of mine has dictatorial tones but made
of nobler stuff, I hope, if it teaches
that those who can, do, and those who can’t, bitch.

Rodríguez’ light touch makes her funny in a range of modes, whether in the clever formality of a sonnet or more subtly, as in the prose poem in which she speaks in the voice of "Peter on the Run." There the breathless enthusiasm of someone who’s been astonished by art is relayed, as over the telephone: "and it suddenly hit me how hard it would be to talk to someone who is looking out on something like that! Well, listen, gotta go now—talk to you later, pal."

Rodríguez’ work is full of such visions: surprising, fleeting, and sustaining. In "Ontology" she describes an annual ritual which serves as a reworking of her own exile and a confirmation that she is now free to navigate her own travels.

Past subject of levitation
I can now will myself to land
for a yearly celebration
on a spot encircled by water—
whether a bleak Channel Island
or a San Juan doesn’t matter.

This ritualized experience is paired two stanzas later with the presentation of a watercolor "painted for me by the woman/ who later became my lover." It is "through the arched doors to her garden" that a new word is exposed.

On my thirty-seventh birthday
the world was neither map nor boat
but something glimpsed in a doorway—

Exiled from home, the speaker actively seeks out an island each year to commemorate her origins and her liberty, but on this birthday the painting and the woman reveal a new way of being. The lyrical "doorway" opens in the narrative expanse, and enriches rather than disrupts it. The moment is emblematic of Rodríguez, in which there is always the possibility of revelation.

Part of what makes this first book such a delight is the promise of more to come. Rodríguez has much to contribute to what she refers to as "the lexicon of exile," like the speaker in her poem of that name, we "can’t afford not to listen."

– Tim Gavin, in Library Journal, 1999/01/12

Rodríguez’s first book of poems, winner of the 1998 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, reveals a remarkable range of poetic craft. Writing in both English and Spanish, she employs free verse, formal verse, and prose-style poems to display the magical power she has with words and joins the likes of Julia Alvarez with her rich bilingual voice. A cuban exile whose poetic inspiration comes from Rilke and Rodrigo (among others), Rodríguez writes about her Cuban childhood, exile, culture, and family. "The invisible body," she writes, "demands you to invent new senses to receive it." These poems are like tiny stones that reveal a new detail, a new crevice with each turn and twist. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.

Back To Top

– Holly Spaulding, in ForeWord Magazine, 1999/01/02

For one whose bread and butter is earned with words, Rodríguez practices a determined suspicion about the power they possess. In her poem "Why I Would Rather Be a Painter," she unapologetically states that "Dictators dwell in palaces of words while peasants swill the backwash of those lies," exposing the consequence of certain words in the terms of people’s real lives. It also appears that in choosing to write poems, Rodríguez has consciously rebelled against the misuse of language and has instead reinvented its function for herself.

Having left Cuba at the age of nine, Rodríguez’s evolution as a writer has been directly influenced by the dubious circumstances of her emigration and subsequent alienation from the Spanish language. Garden of Exile, which won the 1998 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, is a book about reconciling this and other falls from innocence and also about the desire for fulfillment, especially with regard to lesbian love. Throughout the collection there is a preoccupation with finding the appropriate means to record the motifs and rituals of place and experience.

Rodríguez employs rigorous, well-crafted images without self-consciousness or hesitation. Language is treated as three-dimensional: something, which can be handled and manipulated. The process of the poem’s making is demonstrated in the candid layering and accumulation of information within the poem.

By virtue of her aesthetic and utilitarian concerns, saturated sentences catapult the reader into a heightened awareness of the world: "the overripe sapotes fall / with a squishy thud; where the lemon, pointillistically studded / with fruit, glows like a celebration; where the loquat drops / yellow vowels and the scrub jays nesting in the lime / chisel them noisily with their hard black beaks."

Nostalgia for the homeland, and "childhood’s cerulean sky, fat with meringue clouds" is a predictable consequence of emigration. This tendency, however, also inspires an articulate skepticism elsewhere. Her occasionally conversational tone is one means of tempering this, as if to guard against the sloppiness of more elaborate and romantic diction. In one poem, the narrator is a caller on her answering machine; in another, she is humbled in the presence of a senior Chilean novelist wondering "was my outfit too coordinated?"

In the section entitled Cuentos de Cuba, Rodríguez travels a middle path, writing in both of her languages: "me abuela" is not renamed, nor are the "brujas or locos" whom she imagined lived along the beach of her youth. These words that survive without translation do so as if to demand perfect accuracy from the author, "There is no way to pull the harsh tongue / from my mouth." Despite the fracturing this may cause in the poet, they are in face beautiful.

– Reviewer, in Kirkus Reviews, 1999/10/15

During the twentieth century, nationalism replaced imperialism and capitalism beat communism. Free verse supplanted meter and rhyme, abstraction superseded figurative art, and the politics of identity replaced commonality in our increasingly isolated lives. While experience as a Cuban emigré, an artist, a formalist, and a lesbian shapes Rodríguez’s writing, she is a craftsperson who has carefully structured this first collection—winner of the 1998 Kathryn A. Morton Prize. The poems and prose poems cumulatively tell autobiographical stories, explore types of exile that only she knows and that we all know, and create a stylish milieu for the California plein-air paintings she enjoys—including historically appropriate music, movies, fashion, and household items. Rodríguez meets her subject matter as an adult: directly, with sophistication. Individually, the pieces, written in English with some Spanish, talk about and employ language formally. Her interests in language itself, linguistics, and bilingualism serve as background for rhyme schemes she deploys transparently. Fairfield Porter, jazz, and painting are used not in "I did this, I did that" New York School-style, but in Angeleno poems where both dislocation and brightly colored landscapes seem natural. While these poems will surely be popular with various identity politicos, Rodríguez has raised them above the mean with an intelligent and appealing sense of art and craft.

Back To Top

– Reviewer, in Publishers Weekly, 1999/01/09

Neither especially ground-breaking nor ambitious, Rodríguez’s debut nevertheless has its charms: some inhere in its Spanish-and-English felicities, others emerge from the life story the poems tell. Having fled, at age nine, her native Cuba, Rodríguez is now an inquisitive bilingual lesbian free-lance writer in Los Angeles. Her frequent meditations on words and languages can become both precious and self-righteous: she sighs, "how difficult it is to work with words," and declares, "This pitch / of mine has dictatorial tones but made / of nobler stuff, I hope, if it teaches / that those who can, do, and those who can’t, bitch." Rodríguez offers a smorgasbord of forms, among them sonnets, a sestina, a shaped poem, a recipe-poem ("Risotto Ariosto"), and prose poetry. Her free-verse cadence suggests Elizabeth Bishop’s, while her unobtrusive formal versatility and her political interests link Rodríguez to Marilyn Hacker, who selected this book for publication. In the poems that mix English and Spanish, Rodríguez proves most impressive when she refuses to translate for us, instead creating high-speed collisions between cultures and languages. At "The Rosario Beach House," the poet’s aunt "en su gordura floated in the water / como un globo o una ballena." Rodríguez also infuses magic realism to great effect in her prose-poem series "Little Cuba Stories/Cuentos de Cuba." Exciting at times, the book seems better in parts than it does as a whole. Its forms, like its eroticism, can be as sensual as "an anklet of blooming salal dances"; elsewhere the poems can turn as dull as "the mainland...so undramatic / so flatly familiar."

Back To Top

– John Phillip Santos, in San Fransisco Chronicle, 2000/02/06

One of the lesser-noted details of the sad, still-unfolding Elian Gonzalez affair is full of poetic strangeness. When asked to name the dog given to him by a friendly U.S. congressman, the 6-year-old Cuban castaway quickly replied, ``Delfin!,'' explaining how, during his ordeal at sea, dolphins protected him from menacing Caribbean sharks.

Delivered by dolphins, and then initiated at Disney World -- what new myth of America is taking shape inside the mind and heart of little Elian? Regardless of where he ends up, how will he remember this time?

Readers of Aleida Rodriguez's ambitious first book of poems, ``Garden of Exile,'' will find it hard to avoid seeing uncanny echoes there of this most recent, surreal political telenovela of U.S.- Cuban relations. Like young Elian, the poet Rodriguez was born in Cuba (a biographical note says she was born on a kitchen table in Guines) and sent as a child to the United States. Her mother and father stayed in Cuba, awaiting visas, for two more years.

Some of the most powerful poems in this affecting book evoke a complex, exilic melancolia that has carried down through many generations in the New World. This has long been a theme of Cuban writers from Jose Marti to Severo Sarduy. With this book, Rodriguez helps to build a lyrical bridge between American poetry and this poetic tradition of las Americas.

This exilic sense is at the core of Rodriguez's sinuous poetic urge. Her early separation from her childhood home has set in motion a pervasive search for understanding that uncovers memories of Cuba, molecule by molecule, and offers an account of how words, English alloyed with Spanish, take on powerful spiritual meanings in this quest. In this way, Rodriguez's work presents a poetic epistemology of exile.

In a prose poem titled ``My Mother in Two Photographs, Among Other Things,'' Rodriguez writes, ``Two years on my own among strangers had only taught me to be one. I stood, my first tongue ripped out, with my mother's wet, round cheek pressed to the tip of my head. The dark flag of her mustache. Their sour smell, like clothes trapped in a hamper. Emblems of the exile.''

Rodriguez is never sentimental about the lost world of Cuba she remembers only in glimpses. In``Lexicon of Exile,'' she shows a keen but loving regard for the memories of a onetime idyllic childhood home:

There is no way I can pull the harsh tongue
from my mouth, replace it with lambent
turquoise on a white sand palate,
the cluck of coconuts high in the arc of palm trees.

Many American poets, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to Charles Olson, have forged their poetic vision partly out of geomancy, conjuring their verse through the magic of the landscape. In Rodriguez's poems, the landscape is envisioned anew through the lens of the poet's origins in the natural world of Cuba, transforming America from within:

Earth's language is a continuous current,
translating the voice of my early trees along the ground.
I can't afford to listen.
They find me islanded in Los Angeles,
surrounded by a moat filled with glare,
and deliver a lost dictionary of delight.

As many poems in this prize-winning collection testify, Rodriguez, whose very name Aleida invokes``reading'' in Spanish, is a philosophical American poet, unafraid to press out long lines of analytical artistic discernment, ``so much better able to descant exile, language, the sensuality of memory.''

Along with her numerous references to Latin American writers such as Julio Cortazar and Antonio Machado, this philosophical vein in her writing, sometimes carried out in an intense ``tropical Sapphic'' voice, will remind some readers of the work of Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov.

But it is particularly in the alchemy of her interweaving of English and Spanish, both in languageand memory, that Rodriguez begins to reach for a new American poetics, as in ``The Rosario Beach House,'' where the two languages implode into each other and become inextricable:

la regularidad de esos dias was broken once a week when mi tio Guicho
came to take me a la ciudad.

For this American poet, a reconciliation with memory, and with loss, becomes possible through reconciliations of language and meaning. History rarely intrudes; when the Cuban revolution is mentioned, it seems far off, disconnected from the main poetic mission.