Lessons on Expulsion

May 15, 2017
In her hallucinatory debut collection, Sánchez negotiates an imaginative space between oral history and journalistic reportage, overloading the senses as she produces “a body on the verge of fever.” Sex workers, farmers, hormonal adolescents, and churchgoers populate these formally varied lyrics delivered with a whiff of magical realism. Sánchez is as capable of intriguingly surrealist gestures (“the day goes on picking/ the meat from its teeth”) as of photographic depictions. Her narrative voice is perhaps most seductive when most ruthlessly sensory, describing an estranged lover’s angst triggered by the odor of raw ginger, or evoking New York City streets with “the rich smell/ of baked garbage and coconut curry.” Sánchez’s protagonists defy expected cultural roles, braving the disapproval of patriarchs and of “ashen saints with their eyes/ rolled back in blessedness,/ whites the color of old wedding/ dresses.” Ambient unease and confessional impulsivity culminate in the lush shock of “Six Months after Contemplating Suicide,” in which the speaker reckons with wanting “the end// with a serpentine/ greed” and celebrates the hard-won capacity for survival. Throughout, a sense of menace pervades all the joyfully vivid detail, suggesting that only language itself provides a “brief happiness as fierce as the wet muscles of a horse.” Agent: Michelle Brower, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth.

Starred review from April 15, 2017

In this debut collection, Sanchez (winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and a fellowship from the Poetry Foundation) describes what it's like to be a child of immigrants, and, too often, a woman jeered at by men. Sometimes harsh, though always vibrant and superbly written, the poems chronicle what it's like to travel and live in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. The pieces recount events some would prefer to avoid; for instance, the brutal 2014 massacre of Mexican students and the 1616 Tepehuan revolt. Sanchez is also not afraid to catalog the ugly and scarred: semen, spit, mouse shit, and dead fetuses all make appearances. But how she captures the world of the senses: "Watch how I shield/ my ears from the tiny blades// of the cricket song, / but I still love// the way the evening rages on." Written in English, with occasional Spanish phrases, this collection offers an exploration of what it is to live, love, and suffer on this Earth: "Guerra a fuego y sangre: where the bones clatter// from the sapodilla trees." VERDICT Brutal, raw, yet forgiving in the tradition of Walt Whitman, this work is not to be missed.--Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

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