If you’ve never admired the beauty of a flowering banana blossom, you’ll appreciate the following depiction from “Banana [ ]: A History of the Americas,” the centerpiece poem of Paul Hlava Ceballos’s first full-length collection:

Banana²⁹⁰ Leaves Around the Bud Unfold
and Banana Blossoms are Revealed²⁹¹
Oval Shaped, Dark Purple

Bud, Banana Blossom or
Banana Heart²⁹²Dug in the Rich Earth
a Banana Head Dropped in the Earth²⁹³

in Hopes That Banana Breeders
Will²⁹⁴Live
For Ever and Ever

What makes this strangely formal, oddly passive language noteworthy is the fact that Ceballos has lifted these passages—and hundreds more, as the footnotes attest—from an astounding archive of sources that range from scientific treatises and encyclopedia entries, to interviews with labor organizers, declassified CIA documents, and accounts of brutal corporate exploits in Latin America by companies like United Fruit, Chiquita, and Del Monte. Handpicked and arranged into stanzas, the staggering accumulation of quoted material proves somehow both discombobulating and grounding, as Ceballos mixes and matches sources across time and space to establish the banana as an enduring and divisive emblem. Earlier in the same poem, Ceballos strips down each quote such that “banana” hangs like a linguistic counterweight, dead letters lingering at the end of each lyric:

to banana¹³⁴
be banana¹³⁵
a banana¹³⁶
domesticated banana¹³⁷
object banana¹³⁸
overripe banana¹³⁹
as banana¹⁴⁰
an banana¹⁴¹
empire banana¹⁴²

Elsewhere in this collection, Ceballos employs a variety of forms, such as the Ecuadorian Decima, “an oral form from the Esmeraldas province, developed from a parallel Spanish form by Afro-Ecuadorian poets," as well as sonnets written from the points of view of the last rulers of the Incan empire, including Atahualpa, the doomed final king:

When I was killed, I faced my birth.
Dark queen, scarlet blush and gem-sweat,
cradles in arms a newborn king-
dom, which quakes and crumbles in half.

Ceballos’s balance of archival footage with imagined voices of the past brings into sharp focus questions of empire, inheritance, and legacy in ways that resonate beyond national and cultural borders.

poetry-magazineFrom “Banana [ ]”

From “Banana [ ]”