Review of Interstitial Archaeology by Felicia Zamora

letraslatinasblog2
Sep 25
4 min read

Updated: Sep 27

I first met Felicia Zamora right before our panel discussion at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, along with Diannely Antigua. After spending weeks with her latest collection, Interstitial Archaeology, our discussion gave me a new layer of understanding. Zamora reflected on memory, re-wounding when writing, strength, and poetry as activism. It was a deeply informative and moving conversation with two incredible poets.

Interstitial Archaeology is Zamora’s seventh collection of poetry. This book is a testament to rebellion, grief, and wonder. Zamora crafts a portrait of testimonios that paint her experiences in Iowa, and navigating racial trauma both from within and outside of her family. Each poem is its own sprawling field, containing multitudes of memories and observations.

Zamora’s collection begins with the poem “Meditation on Lines,” in which she explores the human body’s relationship to water. She shares a number of memories, all connected to water, like a racist comment during an intimate moment with a lover in a swimming pool and a plumber’s racist comment about Latinos’ dirtiness. Zamora calls in many voices into her poem, ranging from the psychologist duo Dr. Susan Fiske & Dr. Shelley Taylor to poet Amiri Baraka. In her penultimate stanza, Zamora says: "I am a woman of a woman of a woman. / Interior ghost in haunt."

This is the thesis statement for Interstitial Archaeology. This collection explores what haunts us at the personal, national, and global level. Zamora demonstrates how excavating our past, including intergenerational traumas, can help us gain a deeper understanding of ourselves.

Interstitial Archaeology carries so much more than Zamora’s reflections on childhood, but I find her poems about her youth especially moving. In “Lilacs,” Felicia explores the shame and invisibility she felt as a Mexican-American child, even within her own family. The speaker’s grandmother reprimands her for wetting the bed, telling the speaker, “Ugly. Little girls just don’t do that, grandma’s blue eyes stabbed into my / brown.” Zamora observes:

To be born a problem was to swallow silence: medicine meant to erase. To be

groomed into falsities that a word like beauty held space for only other words: blue, green, hazel, white, blonde, ivory, white, white. A definition depends on who speaks

& who remains silent.

What I admire about this poem is Zamora’s ability to hold both the heaviness of childhood trauma and the realities of white supremacy within a few lines. Many children of color are familiar with feeling like an outsider before they can even articulate it. By using the word, “groomed,” she stresses the immense harm caused by these white supremacist notions, how deeply these ideologies can scar marginalized children. This rejection, this swallowing of silence, is what children carry into adulthood.

Intergenerational trauma is referenced again in “Meditations on Ghosts,” where Zamora writes to Gloria Anzaldúa about borders, family, and race. Zamora recalls the racist language and traumatic memories associated with her grandfather. She says, “Vocabulary of wounds—he trained me / in the etymology & phonology of ache.” By the end of the poem, Zamora reclaims her feelings of monstrosity. She ends the poem with:

I am a dangerous beast. I bring discomfort in

shaking the white gaze brown, in my skin, in

mind thinking, in desires manifesting. I spread

claws wide in the mirror. Lick fangs. Rar rar rar.

There is a strength in embracing perceived monstrosity. Through several moments in the collection like this one, Zamora demonstrates how she transforms her pain into her power with a hint of humor too through the image and onomatopoeia, “I spread / claws wide in the mirror. Licks fangs. Rar rar rar.” In another context, this may be a cliché way to end a poem. But in the context of reclaiming one’s monstrosity as a marginalized person, this ending becomes subversive.

What I find so striking about Zamora’s collection is her ability to relate the natural world to her own experiences and reflections. In “Meditations on Flesh,” she reflects on how trauma stays in the body and compares marginalized people's survival tactics to those of the monarch butterfly: "The monarch butterfly uses aposematism to ward off / prey. Sometimes we hide, sometimes illuminate to keep / ourselves alive.” Being a person on the margins can be so isolating, so I love that Zamora finds unity and connection with the natural world.

In the 14th sonnet of the second section, Zamora reflects on racist hierarchies and how colonized bodies are seen as beasts, left with language “coating our molars, lodging in our esophagi, wanting us dead; any excuse to beast a body not white—.” Zamora ends her sonnet with the line, “Imagine us, inscribing anew.”

“Inscribing anew” is exactly what Zamora does in Interstitial Archaeology. She pushes back against ascribed narratives placed on her and other marginalized communities. Zamora’s collection of testimonios, memories, and insights about the world makes for a compelling ambitious seventh collection.

Cloud Delfina Cardona is an artist, writer, and book cover designer from San Antonio, Texas. She is the author of What Remains, winner of the 2020 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, and the past is a jean jacket, winner of the Hub City Press BIPOC Poetry Series. Cardona is the co-founder of Infrarrealista Review, a non-profit that publishes Texan writers. She is an associate at Letras Latinas.