On Rosa Alcalá’s The Lust of Unsentimental Waters

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Vi Khi Nao’s poems “Tarragon, Are You a Wild Boar?” and “Fish Carcass” appear in the November 2016 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

In her poem “Swell,” Rosa Alcalá writes, “To say nothing, / too, is a tactic, a test / of animal proportions.” I don't know why this sexy, short, pithy poem provokes anti-noise in me, but its silent resilience is overwhelming. I have seen Alcalá read her work at the University of Notre Dame for the Angels of the Americlypse conference and have spoken with her at a party. She is a good reader of her own work. There is moisture where the words reside. Not to show that the sky beneath her has been raining, but rather that life is short and will evaporate. Alcalá is a thoughtful, acute thinker and thinks fast on her feet. At the conference, she replied to a question about the intimacy of translation with depth (and even provoked giggles amongst the crowd), so I was not surprised to find these poems on the page fitting for this quiet philosopher of half-fragments. Mostly, she is not afraid to speak about her vulnerability.

This collection moves indeterminately. The poems share an ellipsoidal breath with poetic movement. Alcalá doesn't try to define the world, though at times she tries to embody it, as we have seen in her poem “Swell.” She is trying to take language to another level, where semi-nonsensical, experimental lines or sentences can co-exist with highly intellectualized and sensualized compositions of reality so that, at times, when you see her idea bifurcated at the intersection between a fragment and a complete thought, you know that sentences or words on the page do have separation anxiety. Alcalá captures this anxiety well. We see a thought separate itself from the sensual body of the text and we feel for ourselves and for the page and for the text. We linger past ourselves to simply not lose that extemporal bond.

What I love about Alcalá’s work is that she takes risks. What I mean by risk here is not the one you find where a poet will jump off an emotional and intellectual cliff and land perfectly square on a cement trampoline. What I mean by risk is that sometimes she produces fragments or lines that are not easily accessible. She cloisters her lines, but I don’t feel that she has left me outside to stand alone in the rain or has attempted to confuse me. Some poets will do this out of spite, out of boredom, out of egoism, but I do not see that in her work. In fact, I don't expect to understand everything Alcalá writes, nor should I feel obliged to. But there is tremendous conviction and faith in knowing that you can invite your readers into an enigmatic, poetic party and not make them feel like outsiders.