Virgin by Analicia Sotelo (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Virginby Analicia Sotelo Jennifer Loyd (bio) Analicia Sotelo. Virgin. Milkweed Editions. "Why is this / like this" the speaker asks in Analicia Sotelo's poem "Father Fragments (Or, Yellow Ochre)." It is a child's question, but the adults in the poem ask their share of questions too. "Which one is better?" the speaker's artist-father asks, demanding the child reveal her taste for the conventional over what he terms "art." He contradicts her with a dismissive, "this is what art looks like." Why doesthis look like this? How do we elevate appearance to an art form? Why do we perform certain wounds and cover others? These are the questions that Analicia Sotelo grapples with in her debut book of poems, Virgin, which was chosen by Ross Gay for Copper Nickel's inaugural Jake Adam York Prize in 2016. This prize for a first or second book of poems included publication by Milkweed Editions in February 2018. In her quest to examine the trappings and traps of appearance, Sotelo's poems travel to mythical hells and heavens, with many of the poems set in the purgatories in between. We see a wedding with Dali-esque accessories, a backyard barbecue worthy of Dante's observation, and an apartment complex peopled by Ariadne and Theseus. As we would hope of the offspring of artists, Sotelo's poems are studded with color, texture, and perspective, and they are crafted to reveal patina. Virgin's attitude of interrogation and curiosity about perspective unifies the book. Rather than lifting veils or executing grand gestures of exposure, Sotelo's work is interested in looking at events from different angles. In the book's proem, "Do You Speak Virgin?," the speaker describes her status as bride-object, a "Mexican American fascinator," with a bouquet of cacti and a veil of "fried tongue & chicken wire." The wedding guests "smile up at me," but this bride is also an observer, one who can tell the reader knowingly of her perspective, "you know what it looks like: / all the lovers—cloaked in blood & salt / & never satisfied." In the speaker's mind, "wherever I walk, it's purgatory." Ceremony as purgatory. Moon as priest and judge. A bride who observes as she is observed. Sotelo holds ordinary objects up to the light and shows us that looking can be as awkward as being looked at. The speakers of these poems stumble through social events documenting their own uncertainty and the judgments [End Page 187]of others. At a backyard barbecue crowded with desire, the speaker documents her own appearance, "a cherry-colored cardigan over / a navy print dress, on purpose. / People think I'm sweet," and that of others, "men—all slender, all bearded, lustful to the point of sullen." Her agenda to broadcast her own harm-lessness corresponds to her compassion for the guests suffering from a surfeit of desire, "so / many people are tender from the right angle." Many of the poems in Sotelo's book search for that flattering angle, but even when they expose less flattering perspectives, the delight for the reader is in the looking. One of the most urgent subjects that Virginexamines is that of "my father." Although the image of a father makes surprise appearances throughout the book ("like my father in the mirror in the middle of the night"), the most complex treatment of the seemingly random appearance/disappearance of the speaker's father comprises a series of poems under the heading "Pastoral." In these pieces, Sotelo uses color, the "yellow ochre in my mother's oil set" and the father's "bronze / that could leave melancholy on anyone it touched," to unite connections that have been long fractured. A yellowy-bronze light pervades these pages, from living room walls to "color: yolk" running through "hallways like a trial of light"—even "the shadows had color" in the speaker's memories of her early years. The vividness of color in these poems serves as a stand-in for tangibility. The father is a dream figure, communing at a distance with masculine icons, appearing in the flesh for as long as a weekend only once in the speaker's...