b o y by Consuelo Wise

Diego Báez
May 27
4 min read

In her debut book, b o y, Guatemalan-American poet Consuelo Wise grapples with the devastating loss of her brothers in a long and singularly exquisite poem. As the poet says in the book’s aftermatter: “The majority of these poems were written in my second year of graduate school after the death of my youngest brother, which was two days from the anniversary of my older brother’s death.” Pinned between these terrible memorials, Wise reckons with this truly unfathomable coincidence in syntactically disjointed, elegiac fragments that reach toward grief and recreate the dizzied fog of disbelief, sadness, and anger people often experience when family members pass away unexpectedly. One method Wise employs to convey this intense rush of confounding emotions are wide spans of running, prose-like lines strung together by hyphens, em-dashes, and virgules to enact a breathless stream of consciousness:

brother my brother my older brother the brother I can’t be to little brother—the brother who—brother who—would you—brother of plants/on the plane—carrying cuttings in pocket—brother-dad-who my son/ brother-who-with-hands strong hands climb, hands & holding cousins—sweep house-morning-wash dishes-mom-dad-not-home-chop wood & food for us /brother-who-me-my-brother-brother-of-minewishcouldbebrother-who-

The stuttering repetition, interrupted train of thought, and selectively italicized words and phrases enact the speaker’s disorientation amid the head-spinning injury of loss. The swirling conflation of family relations, body parts, and domestic duties create a kind of poetic hyperventilation perfectly suited for the exasperated moment. Wise resurrects this jarring linguistic overwhelm later in the book when the speaker seeks to process her own attempts at writing through bereavement:

I don’t know how to put this down, how to stop scrubbing, I don’t know how to

let you

my mother, sister, little brother, my father

myall-of-us—how to pour the/wash the/bucket the/ let dry, there’s no space between the

one and the other

surface I’ve been ignoring, there’s no—space, I’m talking to my friend, he’s asking me if I’m

experimenting and I don’t know if I am

—have I stopped—

The unorthodox justification of the text along the right margin forces readers to swing their attention across the page, reorient their semiotic expectations in search of answers even as speaker and text refuse clear resolution. This is another way Wise draws the reader into her speaker’s broken heart and wildered mind, while intentionally withholding names, dates, and other seemingly straightforward information. In other poems, Wise uses brackets and dramatic placement of text on the page to introduce images and echo conceits throughout the book. In one especially stunning instance, Wise situates a lonely moment in the middle of a page:

[ our mother is somewhere washing her hands ]

By abandoning this brief passage, Wise evokes the sense of irrevocable separation experienced by the mother. And yet, bodies of water and acts of washing emerge and submerge throughout the book, serving as a source of consistency and connection across a text beleaguered by isolating loss: “I begin to see the buckets of water, hear them. // I’m looking for ways of finding / you.” Indeed, one of the most notable aspects of b o y is the way Wise manipulates physical space on the page to create deliberate breaks, as if compelling readers to rest, a kind of antidote to the speaker’s buzzing, tachypneic intensity. Nearly a third of the book’s pages are intentionally empty, indicating momentary pauses or transitions, as if moving between memorials or stopping to reflect. The result is an omnipresent absence that works in tandem with the frayed and abraded, profoundly affecting lyrics that define b o y.

For all her highly effective use of white space, Wise is also a poet of breathtaking, impressionistic moments. When combined with a discombobulated voice and unconventional orientation on the page, these moments provide moments of still amid the turmoil:

oak leaves on the surface of the water, end of summer

yesterday, two days ago—a year ago—five years ago—fifteen years ago—yesterday

tomorrow because of you–because of/ you/my

our little jewel of moon boy and boat and august meteor shower and

my sisters’ boys and my friend’s baby and the water on our faces

On the following page, a bracketed fragment stands alone:

[ how to bring you home ]

b o y is a deeply moving, undeniably devastating, beautifully constructed poem. Wise has created a text that enacts and embodies the destabilizing saturation of grief. But it also sings through pain and memory like a puncture through the heart, in all its visceral corporeality.

Diego Báez is a writer, educator, and abolitionist. He is the author of Yaguareté White (UAPress, 2024). Poems and book reviews have appeared online and in print, most recently at Freeman's, The Georgia Review, and Booklist. He lives in Chicago and teaches at the City Colleges.