[Elegies]
Roberto Carlos Garcia

Family history as mythology and elegy as ode collide in this wondrous collection, [Elegies], by Roberto Carlos Garcia. Keenly aware of the traditions in which he weaves his personal family narratives into poetry, Garcia engages deeply with the work of other BIPOC poets. This influence is clear in the thoughtful centos—“mixtapes”—that punctuate the text, fluidly blending lines by poets such as Aracelis Girmay, Willie Perdomo, and Ross Gay. This is the book of a poet who writes in and for community.

Literary tradition is not the only legacy Garcia is invested in. Evident is a devotion to reuniting fragments of family history, such as retelling/re-envisioning the personal stories of his parents. The personal becomes political, in poems where Garcia contrasts the life-and-death stakes of racism for people of color to the ease with which a white reader can return to their “Daily Dose of Internet video.”

[Elegies] is also a book in which the political becomes personal. Garcia grieves massacres on the news and this grief returns him to the personal loss of his grandmother. The final lines of one such poem carry added weight in the midst of a global pandemic: “The whole world is grieving & I think only of your death.

Garcia re-calls his grandmother, using language to close the distance. In “Elegy in which I rename a city for you,” Garcia invokes his grandmother in equal parts despair and hope: “Now, come back, Mami— I have repeated your name / enough times to conjure you.” These elegies are odes, are family memory brought to life on the page: celebrations of who and what has been lost. [Elegies] is worth reading for anyone who seeks poetry as defiance to death and forgetting.

Roberto Carlos Garcia is an Afro-Latinx poet and essayist. Founder of cooperative press, Get Fresh Books Publishing, his first poetry collection Melancolia is available from Červená Barva Press and his second, black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric, is available from Willow Books.

[Elegies] is a publication by Flowersong Press. Click to purchase here.
​

Reviewed by
Carla Sofia Ferreira
2/3/2021

Carla Sofia Ferreira is a Portuguese-American poet and high school teacher in and from Newark, New Jersey. Author of micro-chapbook Ironbound Fados (Ghost City Press 2019), she has received fellowships from DreamYard Radical Poetry Consortium and Sundress Academy for the Arts. Her writing can be found in EcoTheo, The Rumpus, underblong, and Glamour, among others.

Comment Box is loading comments...