On Christine Stoddard's Water for the Cactus Woman

At Luna Luna Magazine, Monique Quintana reviews Christine Stoddard's poetry collection, Water for the Cactus Woman (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), noting straightaway that the "fragmented nature of Latinidad is set against a backdrop of the surreal, making the speaker’s jealousy of her dead the most provocative thread in the collection." More:

...This anguish feels unnerving in its honesty. While the speaker criticizes the racism of her white grandfather, she expresses both a disdain and visceral longing to have her grandmother as flesh and mentor. Her grandmother is only made tangible through the relics of the domestic and this creates a beautiful tension that spans the book.

 The longing for sisterhood becomes a new heartbreak for the speaker as the book progresses. In “Scallop Sister” she says,  “I realized that/ they could not feed her either/ and she would grow up/ stinking of roach spray.” There is the hushed and frightening thought that the ghosts of womanhood may too much to bear or perhaps the speaker’s greatest power.  

Read the full review here.