Tripas

Aristotle, Li Po, Ezra Pound: these are among the cited sources of Brandon Som’s The Tribute Horse (2014), whose textual collages map the arduous passage of Chinese migrants and poetry to North America. With Tripas (2023), Som turns his attention to histories, plural: toxic dumping in Phoenix, Arizona; a father’s “nine-year fight with cancer”; a Chicana grandmother’s work inspecting circuits for the earliest Motorola cellphones. Those latter devices are forerunners to Som’s poetic instrument, his “Teléfono Roto”—literally, a broken telephone; idiomatically, the children’s game telephone. Both are ways of communicating through mishearing, translating signal and noise into surprises of sense and sound.

You can hear Som’s teléfono roto bridging histories in “Fuchi,” whose title is a Spanish exclamation meaning “yuck”:

Fuchi when we passed the stockyard
or city incinerator. Who threw a fart,
Nana would ask, as if the offense
were a grenade or football. I didn’t know
the origins of her phrase, its handoff,
until I learned tirar in Spanish class.
I’ve read of toxins in electronics plants—

Impressive enough to leap from fart jokes to slow environmental violence: “Did the smells elicit a fuchi?” But Som keeps leaping, from “fuchi” to “Fool please,” the Chinese words “kung fu” and “chi,” the golfer Chi Chi Rodríguez, and—completing the circuit—his Nana’s unforgettable speech:

 

What kind of seeing is hard-
wired in our circuitry? They were
like tiny little maps, she tells me, of the city.

Thinking in circuits is not merely a method of aesthetic closure: it’s also a consoling alternative to tragedy’s merciless forward momentum. Som’s characteristic devices—citation, rhetorical questioning, etymological deep-dives—keep time at bay, until his poems dramatically give way. “I go to my dad’s gravestone / in its granite row of grocer’s graves / saying Harlins, saying Garner, saying Floyd,” he writes in “Qingming,” named after the Chinese festival known as Tomb-Sweeping Day. Som could fill pages on his father’s corner store, the “loosies Eric Garner / allegedly sold,” or the indebtedness condensed in the abbreviation IOU. He ends, instead, with a son’s duties: “I sweep the inextricable, / the fricatives of those chiseled characters.”