The Beauty of the Broken
Rotura
Poems by José Angel Araguz
José Angel Araguz has always been a student of the broken: a singer of the defeated and the shattered; a voice for damaged people who somehow manage to press on, miraculously, every day. His earlier collections of poetry have explored brokenness in myth, in family, and in his childhood home of Corpus Christi, Texas. In Rotura—which means “break”— Araguz revisits all those ideas within the context of a passionate, at times ferocious critique of America’s broken culture of racism, and the way it fractures human lives.
Rotura is remarkably consistent in its attention to themes and images of brokenness. The book weaves several metaphors from poem to poem. Each metaphor is a symbol of what may break people, but which can also sustain them as they live, such as the river, the darkness, or the storm. The metaphors function as “conceits” in Araguz’s poetry, and are heirs to the conceits of metaphysical poets like John Donne and Juana Inés de la Cruz. Such sinuous, extended metaphors make Rotura all of a piece—that rare book where each poem connects clearly with every other. |
Of all these metaphors, the river was by far the richest, all at once a danger, a flow, a mirror, and, like Rio Grande, a border. Central to Rotura are “Four Dirges,” that riff on T.S. Eliot’s verse from “Four Quartets”—"the river/Is a strong brown god.” This set of succinct, dense poems conjures the mortal risk, to body and soul, of rivers and tributaries at the Mexico–United States border. Rivers break us apart. They mark a geography of have and have not. They carry tainted water, especially to poor communities. A river reflects us, but it shows our confusion, not our competence. In the water, we see ourselves “through a glass darkly”—dim and murky:
What looks back
when we hold water in our hands and wait, a moment of dark mirror-- that we are then made in the image of what we cannot utter? That we are lost in clouded lifelines as we stand outside a door we’ve had no hand in making? |
The poetic conceit of the river also yields two of Rotura’s beautiful poems: “Certain Rivers” and “Language Dirge.” These poems explore the river metaphor in all its depths and currents—as crossing, as mythology, as mirror, as a place where one life is lost and another found. Above all, the flow of the river is the flow of language when speaks of the lost, the fearful, the desolate, and all the many other forms of the broken. The identification of the river with the idioms of grief and dread is powerful in these poems, nowhere more than in this passage from “Certain Rivers”:
My mother turns to water on the phone,
the river of her voice carries the years between us, years where I have strained to catch something of our changing faces. The river of her voice is a kind of truth I know, I see what lies at the bottom of those years, I wash away the dirt and see my hands tremble. |
The ultimate example of what’s broken, the presidential election of 2016, is an organizing principle of Rotura. Many poems in the book express the pre- and post-election terror felt by Araguz, his family, and others subject to the attack “Go back to your country!” Araguz opens the collection with the poem “A Question Before the Election” and ends it with “Questions After the Election.” Before the election, it's his mother’s question to her son—has he “heard of the KKK?”—that makes the poet ask himself why he keeps teaching and writing, instead of hiding out and being quiet as his mother advised him. After the election, it’s the son’s question to his mother, still living in Texas, who has been pressured by white co-workers to vote for Donald Trump. His mother now must live in the darkness of post-election America, “the darkness of each corner of the factory…of the drive home, switching between stations, nothing sounding right.” Her son honors that darkness in his poetry, elevates and cares for his mother’s experience, and asks “does she know about the darkness I will hold for her?” These are the last words of Rotura, and the love in them touched me as I put down the volume.
By bookending Rotura with questions on the run-up and aftermath of the 2016 election, Araguz further establishes the collection as a consistent whole. The poems in between the first and final poems—“A Question Before the Electon” and “Questions After the Election”—all feel related to the election in one way or another. The poem, “Race,” in which the poet unites “the color of my skin” with “hurried, harried” steps as he runs in fear, resonates more deeply because the reader always sense the 2016 election; Trump’s election looms over the poem with the added dimension of institutional hatred of immigrants and people of color. The ghazal, “Night Matter,” which captures the safety and comfort the poet finds in craft, is especially poignant against the backdrop of danger in post-election life:
By bookending Rotura with questions on the run-up and aftermath of the 2016 election, Araguz further establishes the collection as a consistent whole. The poems in between the first and final poems—“A Question Before the Electon” and “Questions After the Election”—all feel related to the election in one way or another. The poem, “Race,” in which the poet unites “the color of my skin” with “hurried, harried” steps as he runs in fear, resonates more deeply because the reader always sense the 2016 election; Trump’s election looms over the poem with the added dimension of institutional hatred of immigrants and people of color. The ghazal, “Night Matter,” which captures the safety and comfort the poet finds in craft, is especially poignant against the backdrop of danger in post-election life:
The night sky fills with bits of shell and bone,
Or so I write in ink, in night matter. Since men learned print, no night is wholly black, since I learned night, my print is holy matter. |
As all the poems in Rotura show, Araguz the great command of formal elements in English and Spanish poetry. He often uses lines of the pentameter, juxtaposing them with shorter lines to create a flow and stop rhythm—much in the way a river at flows but also, as a boundary, stops. He creates regular stanzas and couplets, and uses them to their full effect as both dividers of images and stair steps to push a poem on to its conclusion. Formal elements are naturally infused in his poems; they are organic to the work, so that his words and images never feel shoe-horned into a structure.
My one wish for Rotura is that it contained more of Araguz’s short, one-page regular poems, like those found in the poem series “Saudade,” after a painting of a woman who shows the melancholia and longing for home conjured by the Portuguese word of the title. These poems, which make up the whole of Araguz’s earlier book, An Empty Pot’s Darkness, are my favorite part of his work. In “Saubade,” the one-page poems are modified Sapphic stanzas: 6 lines (instead of the usual 3) of 9 to 11 syllables, ending with a 3-to-5-syllable 7th line. By choosing the Sapphic, Araguz brings that unique paradox of ancient Greek lyrics—lightness and dignity—to poems about the pain of modern life, from Aleppo to the Pulse nightclub.
Rotura is a polemical book. It does not hold back in expressing the devastation wrought by racism and hatred of immigrants. It openly criticizes the United States a country that “knows its way to truth,” but which “can choose to pass by it.” But Rotura is also a beautiful book. It never loses its music to make a political argument. It always returns to the emotions of living under racism and hostility—the grief and fear, but also the comfort of love and creativity. There is beauty in brokenness, and by making beauty, we help to heal the broken.
My one wish for Rotura is that it contained more of Araguz’s short, one-page regular poems, like those found in the poem series “Saudade,” after a painting of a woman who shows the melancholia and longing for home conjured by the Portuguese word of the title. These poems, which make up the whole of Araguz’s earlier book, An Empty Pot’s Darkness, are my favorite part of his work. In “Saubade,” the one-page poems are modified Sapphic stanzas: 6 lines (instead of the usual 3) of 9 to 11 syllables, ending with a 3-to-5-syllable 7th line. By choosing the Sapphic, Araguz brings that unique paradox of ancient Greek lyrics—lightness and dignity—to poems about the pain of modern life, from Aleppo to the Pulse nightclub.
Rotura is a polemical book. It does not hold back in expressing the devastation wrought by racism and hatred of immigrants. It openly criticizes the United States a country that “knows its way to truth,” but which “can choose to pass by it.” But Rotura is also a beautiful book. It never loses its music to make a political argument. It always returns to the emotions of living under racism and hostility—the grief and fear, but also the comfort of love and creativity. There is beauty in brokenness, and by making beauty, we help to heal the broken.
—Dana Delibovi