Count. By Valerie Martínez.

Abstract

Valerie Martínez’s most recent book of poems, published by the Camino del Sol Latinx Literary Series, begins with what is described as “a critical drought”: a soapy, wet carwash staffed by teenage girls “in cutoffs and bikinis” and advertised as “CARWASH U NO U WANT ONE” (1). Martínez’s response to this scene of drought, both critical and literal, is a flood of stories, those that recount both deluge and survival. Running alongside each other, these narratives weave in and out of the book-length poem: a spectral girl approaching and retreating from the ocean; a realist retelling of the speaker’s 53-day hike along the Santa Fe, “a dying river”; and Indigenous accounts of how humans may be able learn, through disaster, to live in balance. Together, they register wave after wave of what we’ve lost, and what we stand to lose. But while the poem is an elegy for the endangered and the extinct—golden frogs and staghorn coral, mondo grass at the end of its ability to adapt—Count also resists a familiar ecopoetic despair in its varied responses to environmental injustice and threat. From outraged silence—“I stifle the urge to mumble and cough” (10)—to helpless inaction—“All he could do: watch” (24) to an almost-acceptance—“we’ve had/our short time—brilliant and careless” (37), the speaker witnesses the world multiply with “wonder, grief,/urgency”(22). And while false comfort is rejected—such comfort is “[a] ruse, palliation”(25)—on the other side of this flood of loss are the stories of survival and regeneration: the ice plant closing its stomata to preserve water; a crab remaking its gills in response to changing conditions; the repetition of scant but real human survival in the Indigenous stories that resist and rewrite settler and capital-driven narratives. At the close of the book, the poem offers up a particularly powerful way to redress the losses incurred by peoples consistently “at odds with the earth” (41) in the story of Hadanisht’é, a deity who puts humans to work reassembling “a disintegrating world,” then teaches them to live with more grace on a planet both fractured and beautiful (43).