That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove

That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove by Silvina López Medin is a collection in three parts encompassing an exploration of familial history and memory, a consideration of how meaning is constructed through words, and finally, meditations on the process of writing and revision. Though it opens on a nostalgic note, recalling how “a little girl sucked the last / guts of cake from a candle,” the book moves increasingly toward interior monologues that excavate a writer’s mind at work: “Swimming is pushing water, the same way / we push words.” 

While the title poem suggests “we should pare the word back to its origin: / … maybe break it,” if words are maps, they only reveal so much. Translator Jasmine V. Bailey’s poetic sensibilities shine at junctures where etymology tangles with syntax, as she figures out “how to make from a hint of laughter / a lightning bolt” (“cómo hacer un relámpago / de una mínima risa”). Simple yet unexpected flips of composition allow these translations to unfold naturally, finding rhythms that feel crisp and completely at home in English.

As the poems grow progressively sparser, they let in light and liquid shadows, with lines that are in conversation with Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck”: “I say blue—that’s / what water looks like at first // the tone falls apart.” Perception breaks open when the thing itself is subjected to the associations springing to mind. In “Three Worms in the Bottom of the Pool Make an Abstract Painting,”Medin resists images, sliding into allegory:

it rained, rained like it meant it
not like the rain that falls in films
to signify something else.

This is a speaker as moved by the process of creation as by their physical environment, copying “the painter who leans his body / deeper and deeper / towards the canvas / … about to fall into the painting” and noting how “The lake / infects me with its stillness.”