Atlas of an Ancient World | May 31, 2024 | Black Lawrence Press | Pages 108 | ISBN: 978-1625570840 | $18.95
With its title promise of cartographic archaeology, Chilango writer Violeta Orozco’s third collection of poetry, Atlas of An Ancient World, expands and compresses time as it imagines prehistoric lands and extrapolates new maps for future wayfinding. Time moves neither as an arrow nor cycle across the book’s pages. Instead, it assumes a variety of familiar shapes inspired by nature—ravines, tunnels, coils—but Orozco’s speakers are also interested in “floating whorls of liquid time” and “the deep memory of snow.” In one poem, desert-dwelling family members contrast the distant, sun-drenched ridges of the Catalinas against the wet flesh of cacti in the foreground:
They tell time in tides
and crushed spines,
blackened backbones, tree-rings
upon a desert’s dry shores.
The cactus carcass marks time
inside her body, saving water
and monsoon sights for seasons
emptied of blue fields
when the hot stare of the red stain
sets fire to the Tucson mountains.
The “tree-rings / upon a desert’s dry shores” allude to the coils of time bound up inside bygone pines and spiny mesquites that once abutted paleolithic bodies of water many millions of years ago. In other poems, Orozco connects the corporeality of plants and minerals to her own human form, as one speaker addresses the ancestrality within her veins: “I feel you, blood within my bones / surge as the swell heaves with foam / amada ancestra, hermana, guía.” These lines collapse vast tracts of earth and sea into the singular point of a person, while at the same time, the speaker’s interiority is inextricably linked to her surroundings. Water, blood, body, and stone commingle to create a richly textured matrix of matter and energy, always shifting. Of course, this pulsating agglomerate of life isn’t without dilemmas, miscues, and complications. In “Tidal Birds,” the speaker admits difficulty in deciphering riparian sounds amid encroaching humans:
It took me two years to learn to listen to the river.
She wasn’t easy to fathom,
dark as she’d become after swarms of cities
settled upon her shores.
While Orozco’s lively animations of the natural world may remind readers of Iñupiaq poet dg okpik’s discombobulating blood snow (2022) or the sweeping azul vistas of Allison Adele Hedge Coke’s Look At This Blue (2022), Atlas of An Ancient World also accounts for the multifaceted impact of humans on this planet in ways similar to Veneozolana poet Oriette D’Angelo’s Homeland of Swarms (2024), which creates a kind of dizzying poetic parallax between the city of Caracas and its inhabitants, as lyrical focus zooms, pans, and cuts between individual persons (las personas) and the collective people (la gente). Orozco’s “Ode to the Industrial Peripheries of Mexico City” provides an example, as the speaker recounts the reprisal of a surprising desire: “Before I came to this midwestern woodland / I didn’t realize how much I missed / the smell / of fossil fuels / burning / like a bonfire / in the middle of the night.” These lines speak of displacement and migration amid a conflicting sense of longing for that familiar scent, destructive by definition though it may be. Another poem reveals the tenuous balance between self, city, and nature: “I am indeed, / a true survivor / like these trees / holding their ground / in an encroaching city.”
A final point of conspicuous brilliance, the one that surfaces throughout the book and truly defines its texture, is the way Orozco renders the natural world as a vivid, evolving constellation of plant, animal, and inorganic mass vibrating with life, from the “scent of pink peppercorns from a native tree: / el pirul / a burning pungence,” to the “flaming fire corals [and] fierce puffer fish,” to the “turquoise rampage” where children play in the sea. A distinguishing feature of Orozco’s bright world: lush surroundings are never merely stage nor backdrop, but actors in their own rights, possessed of spirit, soul, and body all the same. In one poem, the speaker acknowledges this corporeal reciprocity:
The coral reef knew me as well as I knew her.
So often I had tributed my blood
to the reef’s rocks, stung by sea urchins,
thick thorns thrusting living spears into my skin
In another poem, the speaker traces this lineage of stone and life and soul back to the ancestors in a thread that is, indeed, inseparable from the past, present, and future:
I will find
My own source of power in this mountain
I will hike the trails my elders once adored
The mountain bears the memories you forgot.
The wide scope and deep lens of this revelation can seem daunting. But in constructing the above stanza in a resolute future tense, Orozco reminds readers that there is power in following the footsteps of predecessors, as we ourselves become the mantle bearers for future generations, whether related by blood or metaphor.
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.