In his compelling debut collection, We Borrowed Gentleness, J. Estanislao Lopez warns against the limits of the language a poet uses. “All you can offer anyone suffering in the world,” he writes, “is a sentence, which is more often than not not enough.” Still, he knows that words, however meager, help to counter life’s irremediable violence: “Against death, detail might now be a necessary thing.” For Lopez, the details begin in Texas, with a father who crossed the river from Nuevo Laredo, arriving in an El Norte whose “second name” is, ironically, “the South.” With unsentimental directness, the poems portray an emotionally withholding father (“I try to remember / which of my father’s silences // tucked me in at night”), a victimized and religious mother (“faith alone / saved her from suicide”), a reactionary and assimilated brother (“I am losing my brother to whiteness”), and a foolish, dying grandmother, who tells his mother she’s “sorry I could never love you.” A balanced veracity prevents these characterizations from feeling mean-spirited, since the poems also depict the speaker’s own shortcomings as a divorced husband and absent father, who encounters an old dollhouse that he never assembled for his daughter:

One gives up on things, like the idea
of being the father you wish you had.

Lopez’s search for meaning widens from family history to the “calcified” American empire, the impending cataclysm of global warming (“Maybe there’s room / in the margin of error for us to save ourselves”), science and metaphysics, and Biblical tales (Genesis, Solomon, Jephthah’s daughter) for which he poses “alternate ending[s]” and beginnings that would prevent them from becoming mere shibboleths. But he returns, with memorable intimacy, to his father’s silent masculinity, finding a poet’s way of nurturing a son, through the fragile posterity of words:

As my thumb
wipes the milk

from my son’s lips,
I think of

my father’s lips.
They’re closed.

They never say
the words

withheld by
strong men.

I say the words.
I say them again:

the words
that will survive me.