Review

Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Other Fugitives and other Strangers (Tupelo Press 2006) is the type of poetry book some of us may be uncomfortable reading in that it challenges our comfortable distance from homoerotic love, which like all relationships, deals with issues of darkness, dominance and survival. The very things that were once hidden come to light with poems that take from the image of the body, its fragility and fleeting transitory nature and shine. It is the naked body, clavicle, skin, eye, pelvis and its animal nature that makes these poems honest and genuine in terms of the speaker’s dealing with human flaws and triumphs. In a sense, the poems themselves are a love song to the body. In “Good Boy” the speaker asks, “Wasn’t I a good boy once? Wasn’t I/ once stripped of body hair and knuckle, a laugh/so clean it stretched like a white sheet on the clothesline?/ Wasn’t my voice once/ the contagious note of a two-fingered-bell?” This first stanza for the opening poem sets up the book which is in many ways is a movement or dance through boyhood innocence to a masculine desire for dominance. Later in the same poem we hear, “Surely my anger had always been squatting its claws, eager/to tear its way out of my ten-year-old ribs…I must have ingested hatred/ through the spoons of my childhood./ I must have been the changeling matured/ of a knife slit haunted/ me, so I carved it free.// I hold your head up like/ a trophy, rub your scar. Please promise me it won’t cut/ back. I don’t like to bleed.”

It is in this manner of examining the wound, whether it is a psychological cut, physical injury, internalized or externalized, the wound is the cause or the impetus of what comes after injury and it is this recovery with which the collection moves readers. Many poems deal with the exhaustion of abuse and the urgent desire to separate out of a protective need.

In “Neurotic Double” the straight-edged honest tone continues with a series of images that exude the aftermath of struggle. “I’m not ashamed of my naked body,/ my naked body is ashamed of me,/ of how I tinge/ and stain him, then blame him for what I did./” The internal battle of our own existence with a body that in the end will betray us with age and death is ever present in these beautifully haunting poems. A poem called “Body, Anti-Body” also exudes the violence of an internal battle. “…displeased, my flesh/began to seek those strangers/generous with touch. With them/ I’m not a name, I’m body./ I’m not a ghost, I’m living skin// that craves the skirmish scars/ of passion and taking stock/ in the dark of nick and bite/ the bruise, the stench of triumph/ thickening air. These men act// on instinct, with violence/ that drives and thrusts and imposes/ pure punishment upon me.” This animalistic and desperate urgency to exist as a corporeal being in the world of living things carries with it the need to feel.

Poems like “Welts off the Bone” continue with an onslaught of reminders; we are human and we are body. There is a questioning of religious faith “We lock our limbs to crush the saints we don’t believe in./ We snap shut the pretense of altar alms, the delicacy of foreskin against cotting in the sacristan’s cassock.” The new and revised communion is with the speaker’s lover. “Everything that’s you is me. No secrets, love, pure confession./ The wafer of your ear is raw is sweet.” These poems are in the here and now and they breathe with a strange urgency, a need to live aggressively and yet there is the constant questioning of such dominance in its very presence in the collection.

The poems themselves are dangerous and they themselves “risk and love for things exotic.” We are indeed fugitives with debts and life is a series of losses and resolutions. Despite the serious mood of many of the poems there is a sense of comic relief. In “The Untimely Return of My Dead” the speaker opens, “With three loud knocks my dead lover/ makes himself known. His first complaints, I suspect:/ Why did you change the locks? Why, goddamit,/ did you bury me in blue? Makes me look fat, for crissake!”

Gonzalez’s Other Fugitives and Other Strangers is about our own sense of otherness or separateness in a world of pain and joy, how we partake in living, and how we survive. This is a poignant yet edgy collection of poems that cuts through to what it means to be human like a razor.