Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier

One anxiety running through Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier is the question of how poetry might usefully deliver social commentary. Emanuel Xavier cynically offers one possibility when he writes, “Let go of the past, the revolution has fresh / faces at the forefront. Move on. Your words can / no longer signal change.” Yet can the past be so easily disowned? As Xavier explains in the book’s preface, his poems primarily draw on his experiences of homelessness, addiction, and abuse, as a gay Latinx Nuyorican “pier-queen” and spoken-word poet. These poems are interested in the problems of return and belonging. What does it mean to be an American, especially a queer person of color who “live[s] in an America where America still lives in us”? Here, Xavier offers another irresolute contradiction, one that adds to the book’s internal sense of being conflicted about the knotty and traditional forms of nationalism, between the longing to become America’s “child,” via the search for an American mother-tongue, and the desire to reject it.

This aporia makes itself visible in Xavier’s language, in his charged and audacious words often “crisp with insolence,” a guerrilla poetic style that presents itself as simple yet is constantly struggling between returning to the past, and racing toward an ambivalent future, which risks leaving the writer behind altogether. Toward the end of the collection, Xavier’s style becomes more loose and formally interesting. “Sometimes We’re Invisible” presents a series of official news headlines juxtaposed against headlines describing various instances of homophobic and transphobic violence. In this way, Xavier draws our attention to an invisible narrative of events the book has tried to spotlight. Through these transcultural and multilingual legacies of Nuyorican history, which queer masculinity and break tradition, Selected Poems asks us to confront those words that are always “sacred and worth remembering.”