YOU by Rosa Alcalá | Coffee House Press | Pages 88 | April 2024 | ISBN: 9781566897013
“Your mother ran from a man she never named, and taught you to do the same. She never said you could change the world, only that you should run.”
—Rosa Alcalá, YOU
In the poems in YOU, Rosa Alcalá’s speaker reflects upon her life and the iterations of womanhood contained within. Having come of age in a culture so different from that of her mother, these experiences inform which lessons she chooses to impart upon her daughter.
An underlying note throughout the poems in YOU is the ever present threat of violence to women. The speaker, tracing this back to its origin, lands on the father as the first perpetrator of violence in a girl’s life: “But you are sure, because you’ve read the history of fathers, that violence has only been pulled further inward, fortified inside the home, where it has always been and where it began.” In an email interview, I asked Alcalá about the way mothers train daughters to survive the constant threat of violence, and she expressed that this common element in the poems was somewhat of a surprise. “I thought I was writing poems about the embodied joy of youth,” she wrote. “But as the specter of violence began to emerge…I understood that the joy the younger ‘you’ expresses in her young, female body is unwittingly disavowing the limits put on it by cultural and familial expectations.” These expectations stem in part from the speaker’s mother, whose lived experiences with men are at odds with her desires for her daughter’s life. The poem “Your Mother’s Advice,” for example, is a litany of warnings: “Do not take rides. Do not lead him to your car or door.” Yet the same poem ends with “Never say no to a party.” Thus is the speaker’s dilemma, which she faces both as her mother’s daughter and her daughter’s mother. As Alcalá told me: “How do you allow the next generation a fuller expression of freedom while acknowledging the history and persistence of misogyny and violence?”
In her youth, the speaker’s expressions of femininity were themselves a rebellion, bringing the threat of danger. In “You, a Hand, Another,” the speaker describes being groped while crowd surfing: “as if the only thing keeping you up were also trying to crawl inside you.” In the same poem, another girl’s insistence on crowd surfing regardless illustrates the speaker’s dilemma and the complexity of the performance of femininity. “It takes a lifetime to become aware of the ways the misogynistic messages and images one has been fed shape a sense of self,” Alcalá said. Now middle-aged, the speaker contends with a new performance–invisibility: “the years come like velvet curtains over dazzling bodies, stuck now with failing sight, failing to be seen.” The speaker is similarly performing identity as she struggles to reconcile the culture of her parents (which “she desperately wants to keep intact, even as everything else has changed,” according to Alcalá) with the world in which she now lives, among people with a “summer home with the ocean view” whose life she “felt sick for wanting.” Only with the perspective lent by time is the speaker able to articulate these performances, with poetry as her chosen medium, a medium which indicates just how different her life is than her parents’.
In “How You Became a Poet,” the speaker is an observer, “invisible but with such big eyes.” Alcalá described this as a pivotal moment: “All of the tensions, all of the questions regarding women and men, all of the ruptures between generations began for her at that moment,” she said. Poetry, then, is a means for the speaker to process all that she has observed, as in “You & the Raw Bullets”: “Now…you are spitting up the bullets slow-simmered in your own juices.” This use of poetry is familiar to many poets, but the risks of such a self-serving act are expressed in “A Girl Like You,” where the speaker takes on the voice of a girl from her neighborhood who was killed by a group of boys and is called out by the same voice for her ventriloquism: “you prop up the dead for your own purposes.” “The speaker is constantly relishing in self-reproach regarding her own current privilege,” Alcalá wrote to me. “And the fact that she writes poetry—what’s more bougie!” In poems such as “You & the Dying Languages,” the speaker acknowledges the relative frivolousness of poetry: “when your daughter knocks you can’t say, Leave me alone, I am making a poem, as if that’s something useful.” The speaker implies her daughter’s privilege, indirectly admitting that she may or may not need the same teachings that the speaker received from her mother. And yet, the speaker writes this book “as manual, as heirloom” for her daughter, employing poetry as an archive of knowledge like the speaker of Isabel Zapata’s In Vitro.
The last poem in the collection is potent in its contrast as the speaker decides to turn her poetry outward. As Alcalá explained: “she will no longer look back at that original scene, no longer be the faithful translator of that family history, and instead look forward, no matter how uncomfortable it may feel, and be of service to what is around her.”
Brittany Torres Rivera is a bilingual, Puerto Rican writer. She graduated from Florida International University with a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Brittany is an alumna of the Fulbright Program and currently works as an Editorial and Administrative Assistant at Graywolf Press.