Stepmotherland
One way to enhance
an object is with
a fresh coat of paint.
What a riot when doing so
makes a work of art!
Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s Stepmotherland is at turns ekphrastic and devotional, both confident and questioning. The Panamanian speaker in these poems grapples with what it means to pursue the American dream while queer and Black and navigating a “culture written in the tongue of / someone else’s empire.” Stepmotherland traces and retraces trauma while expertly delighting in the richer possibilities of multilingual writing, as in “Angelitos Negros” where “black & blanco”offers unexpected alliteration.
The collection recontextualizes concepts by artists already expert in visual remixing, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Michael Paul Britto, Kehinde Wiley. Holnes’s layering has a pentimento effect, and the ghosts of images remain visible even after being painted over; we can see the referenced artwork, but these poems swerve firmly into new ideas and emotional landscapes. Kara Walker’s towering sugar sculpture is drawn into Houston’s nightlife in “Marvelous Sugar Baby” as a speaker hears Celia Cruz sing “azucar!” and meditates on the contrast between sugarcane—“so hard to chop down that white men / once thought only the Negros / could do it”—and sugar, “so soluble and / precious,” a dichotomy that reverberates in the projected strength and vulnerability of black bodies.
Stepmotherland casts a wide net formally, and “Scenes from Operation Just Cause” draws on the screenplay poems of A. Van Jordan to give us a “(Bird’s Eye Shot)”:
A strip of earth separating
a golden glaze from
the ocean’s cerulean surface shakes.
El mar, la mar, brillantez marina.
The sun mirrors the
fish-like flesh of the sea.
There is humor throughout this collection, with Pride & Prejudice’s “a truth so universal” woven into a poem that explores someone’s decision to come out, and the playful juxtaposition of Mexican and Panamanian Spanish in “OTM or Other Than Mexican”: “Other than amiguin / We fren.” Stepmotherland is a collection that sings out the power of multilingual writing; as we see in “Af•ri•can-A•mer•i•can•ize,” this is a poet “becoming a force forever expanding the universe.”