Hurricanes, earthquakes, blackouts, debt, femicides, Superfund sites, military bases, crypto-capitalism, and colonialism are among the calamities that trouble Ana Portnoy Brimmer’s To Love an Island (2021, YesYes Books), her debut collection. Not all, however, is calamity. So, too, is there love—which is to say, revolt.
Indeed, the cover art by Colectivo Moriví avows a combative poetry: the protesters with black shields in hand, an array of fists held high. The color scheme of black shields with lone white star is a nod to the blackened Puerto Rican flag, a symbol of dissent that came in the wake of the debt crisis and its U.S.-appointed oversight council, known colloquially as La Junta. It is a nod, in other words, to a pueblo candela (a people ablaze), enlivened by love and rage as much as loss and grief. For this is a standoff, which the remainder of the scene (found on the back cover) makes evident: the police in riot gear, batons at the ready.
Portnoy Brimmer’s poetry is kindred to this aesthetic: she is the woman in the center who looks back at us and says, “the men in uniform fear [our] reservoir of sorrow will drown them,” drown them in a “beautiful excess” of blaring pots and wild strawberries, molotovs and hummingbirds—the more unlikely and prophetic, the better. How to poetically conjure revolt and its horizons—those beyond ruin, beyond sheer victimhood—are, thus, what are at stake: a cada lechón le llega su renuncia (“every swine shall have its day,” or alternatively, “get its just desserts”). Such is the sentiment that suffuses this collection, a collection that teems with vibrancy and lyrical swagger, with odes to militant desire and the “largeness” that Puerto Rico, like any small isla, truly is.
Divided into five sections (“Breathing up Storms,” “Scarred as Islands,” “Only the Ocean Answers,” “Forced Flowering,” and “Guillotine—A Flag”), we witness Portnoy Brimmer reckon with “this sutured raft adrift at sea.” That raft, no doubt, is the isla itself, on whose back we find a people adrift in waters “rank / with disaster,” and within whose verses we hear Portnoy Brimmer crying out: “teach us to stay afloat to flee the sinking.” For “to love an island,” she says, is a somewhat accursed attachment: “is never learning/how to swim / knowing / that it ends / with drowning.” At other times, the raft is Portnoy Brimmer herself, adrift in the northeastern United States, where
I was told I’d be swallowed up/by weather, wouldn’t survive the chill/of this country—its biting ways.
It is indeed torment for her, but not because of the weather inasmuch as the spectral shadow that Puerto Rico casts everywhere she looks. Looking at the quaint shutters of upstate suburbia homes, for instance, she is reminded that shutters, “In my archipelago [. . .] Are not ornament / of choice—but armor, protection against a storm.” By “storm” she means, of course, not just literal storms (i.e., hurricanes), but the fiscal storm that is the coloniality of power:
Hundreds of public schools—shuttered.
Foreclosed homes—shuttered. Bakeries,
hairdressers, pharmacies—shuttered.
Clinics—shuttered. Pensions—shuttered.
Campuses—shuttered. Rivers, coastlines,
and acres—shuttered.
These travesties vitiate her every thought, as her heart grows not fonder but sickened by absence, so much so that she can do no other than write about her homeland: Forgive me if when I speak / of myself, I speak of land. […] forgive me / for the earth tumbling out of my mouth.
Home, in this regard, is history, is warmth, is sorrow, is an obsession, one that inhabits her and rejoins her to protest. This is not, after all, a lyrical lament that says “woe is me” or, more insidiously, “look at how resilient I am.” It is a collective chant that wants to bleed resilience red, until it “howl[s] like the haunting that stranded us.”
In lieu of resilience or sympathy, thus, Portnoy Brimmer offers love—a love we’d likely call militant, or radical, or decolonial. No section more emphatically embodies that militancy than does the one titled “Guillotine—A Flag.” The guillotine is, after all, no idle symbol. It conjures (French) revolutionary terror, or else justice: the just desserts that await the swine. In Portnoy Brimmer’s verse, it is the machete and cacerolas (saucepans) that resound—each a historically oppressive tool (whether for Afro-Boricuas, the peasantry, or women) that, when held right, becomes an insurrectionary weapon. There is not, for all that, a revolutionary terror that reigns in these verses inasmuch as a “combative” hunger, a people ready for “a taste / of fresh cleave.” This hunger was put on display in the Verano Boricua, that ecstatic summer of 2019 when tens of thousands flooded the streets and ousted the governor Ricardo Rosselló, no longer willing to tolerate his bigotry and neglect. Portnoy Brimmer renders this people’s referendum as akin to an expiatory ritual: the drums that feverishly beat, the roasted pig’s head held high for all to see. But for “a nation so hungry, a single swine / will not suffice.” The debts run much deeper, the insidiousness subtler and more extensive than one miscreant, which is why, Portnoy Brimmer menacingly states, “Our machetes quiver afresh [. . .] The entire sty is in for a butchering.”
There is, accordingly, unfinished work at hand, work that calls not for heroism, classically construed, inasmuch as an anonymous fidelity to “the beauty of living,” living in such a way that we leave behind us “a world, closer to our imagining.” For Portnoy Brimmer, that more desirable world is one in which profit is shunned for the prophetic:
Barter and trade, self-made currency, solidary economy, barbershops,
pharmacies, restaurants, bakers, artisans, musicians, poets—prophet.
Cruise ships, crypto dicks, paradise, won’t suffice, build a city,
atop the city, of desert reefs and homes—profit.
Biodiversity, green farms, public art, “free hair,” and rainbow flags also rank amongst the prophetic, as against the likes of GMOs, Wall Street, riot shields, and tear gas. Whichever the case, prosperity and wellness are not, for Portnoy Brimmer, predicated on quantity and exogeneity, but on quality and endogeneity—the fruits of one’s own soil and one’s own hands and know-how: “We have to grow our own to be our own,” says the farmer to the poet. In her opening poem, “Strawberries,” Portnoy Brimmer takes us to visit a farm in the mountains, where coffee is traditionally grown. It is small yet independent and diverse, where coffee, papaya, bananas, and, unexpectedly, wild strawberries grow. That “steep hill” and its surprises becomes for her an allegory of “everything we’re slowly trying to become,” despite so inhospitable a (colonial) climate. This includes the poet herself. Like those wild strawberries, Portnoy Brimmer is an unlikely Boricua, the daughter of Mexican Jewish immigrants. But this isla and its pueblo are no less hers. She has lived or bore witness to it: the shuttered campuses and clinics, the storms, blackouts, deaths, and exodus . . . but so, too, the murals and the music, the mutual aid and the mobilizations.
That eclectic experience is reflected in a poetry that is formally eclectic, though free verse couplets and odes stand out, as do the imagery and phenomenology of protests. In this respect, Portnoy Brimmer’s debts to visual artists are perhaps more noteworthy than those to poets. No doubt, we hear her resound alongside other Boricua poets, especially Roque Raquel Rivera Salas, whose work adorns the book’s epigraphs. But so, too, is much of Portnoy Brimmer’s poetry an ekphrastic ode to the street art and “artivism”—especially the community-led murals—of the all-women collectives Colectivo Moriviví and Bemba PR.
In the end, thus, To Love and Island reminds us that love is not a matter of genomes, phenotypes, or surnames—let alone the Spanish language (the collection, after all, is written almost exclusively in English). Love, rather, is a matter of passionate attachments and their collective manifestations, to include, needless to say, art. For it is thereby and therein that we affirm the grandeur and largeness of our collective selves. Granted, that may depend on where one stands, since love entails proximity and intimacy. If you look from afar, relying only on maps, you will see only smallness in Puerto Rico. But from its shores or mountain peaks, “An entire world sprawls / beneath,” a “largeness” one can touch and “breath in.” These the words of her closing poem, “Smallness.”
But let’s not tame Portnoy Brimmer’s (or her gente’s) voice. The task at hand is not to poetically contemplate the beauty of Puerto Rico, as if such sentimentality were tantamount to love. Our love should make us quake, quake like a storm, a storm that tears down “the whole blood-marbled edifice.” And so to echo Portnoy Brimmer’s words: “let it tremble…”
Visionary, restorative, and fierce, To Love an Island is a most welcomed debut.
