Rereading Sandra Cisneros's My Wicked Wicked Ways

At Pop Matters, Diane Leach looks at the new edition of Sandra Cisneros's My Wicked Wicked Ways, originally published in 1987 and "a poetic dispatch from the trenches of the lone woman writer." More:

My Wicked Wicked Ways divides into four sections: South/2100 West; My Wicked Wicked Ways; Other Countries and; The Rodrigo Poems. South/2100 West opens with “Velorio”.

The narrator, a young girl, is playing outside with friends Rachel and Lucy. The girls run into Lucy’s living room, where Lucy’s sister, a dead infant, lies in a “satin box like a valentine”. Horror aside, the image clashes impossibly with the flushed vitality of the three little girls.

Thus, Cisneros sets the tone. There will be no taking of tea in hushed rooms. Instead, feet kick in doors. Rocks sail through windows. Records crack over heads. “Curtains” hide furnishings that aren’t paid for, shoddy apartment interiors, walls painted in the wrong colors.

In the second section, My Wicked Wicked Ways, the poet begins with discovering herself. And that self is “bad”, not destined to become a docile wife and mother. She is “I the Woman”, “notorious”, the Thursday night woman.

In “The Poet Reflects on Her Solitary Fate”, Cisneros writes of being the sole daughter, the youngest, who “has abandoned the brothers”, who in turn have “left her/ to her own device”. That device is poetry.

“Other Countries” offers distance, but not necessarily escape. “December 24, Paris-Notre-Dame” refers not to a holiday in Paris but an implied suicide in the Seine. The lovely men of Europe are either married or, like Jahn Franco, given to implausible fabrications. (“Letter to Jahn Franco-Venice”) There are goodbyes, to Cesare, to Natale, to Richard. You know it’s really over when there are “No shoes. No angry doors.” (“To Cesare, Goodbye” “Trieste”, “Ciao to Italy”, “One Last Poem for Richard”).

My Wicked Wicked Ways concludes with The Rodrigo Poems. It is unfortunate that “unforgettable” has become a trite term, for these poems truly are. Every woman has a Rodrigo in her life. But few of us can wring art from our grief as Cisneros has, here.

Read all about it at Pop Matters.