Senegal Taxi

February 25, 2013
Herrera (Half the World in Light) has become nationally famous for his many ambitious, jagged, nonlinear, sometimes performance-based poems and scenes from Mexican-American life: his profile spiked when he became, in 2012, poet laureate of California. This first volume since then shows his fierce and innovative spirit, his sense of global responsibility, and his attention to voice and character; its frightening prose blocks, fictional interview transcripts, anguished verse recollections, puzzling concrete poems (“one one one one one”) and gestural visual art follow the child refugees and tormented former soldiers of Darfur in the years of the Janjaweed and their attempts at genocide, on its way to the birth of the new nation South Sudan. One of its “ghost children” tries to “raise a classroom with sticks... Set the table with mud”; some children escape Darfur in the eponymous taxi, finding their way to Brooklyn. “Kalash,” the Kalashnikov rifle, becomes both a symbol and a menacing character; a former militiaman baffles an obtuse American as he tries to account for his dreams. The sequence exists on the border between creative nonfiction and expressionistic response to catastrophe. It may not add much to what journalists have already shown Americans about this conflict, and yet it adds, to the poetry of international witness, Herrera’s compelling and quick-witted voice.

Starred review from April 15, 2013

National Book Critics Circle winner Herrera (Half the World in Light) has always written passionately about human rights issues. Here he expands his purview to encompass genocide in Darfur, offering a book-length poem that takes in the voices of three children who have survived a Janjaweed attack on their village, a U.S. TV news anchor who interviews a former Janjaweed, an ant that offers a ground-level perspective on slaughter, a Kalashnikov AK-47 used in the killing ("I came down the mountain in full gallop/ With my sister Mortar"), and others. Most affecting are the voices of the children: one-eyed Abdullah, the village girl Sahel, and Ibrahim, who relates part of the story from the taxi he now drives in New York ("I learn inside this taxi, Ms. You tell me your story. I tell you story too"). Throughout, Herrera's voice is urgent and his imagery as sharp-edged as the sun. Formal devices--strings of unpunctuated words suggesting desperation, typescript for the TV interview, the poems labeled "mud drawings" that relate the time the children spent hiding in a cave--add immediacy and interest. VERDICT Beautifully wrought and wholly persuasive; highly recommended.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

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