In Sons of Salt (BOA Editions, 2024), Yaccaira Salvatierra explores the griefs of motherhood through an intimate relationship with natural elements, including the ocean, the air, and the ash of volcano. While not a mother, I found myself deeply moved by these poems and connected to them as a daughter-who-mothers, as someone who also knows the sensation of sinking. I, too, have flirted at the shore of the ocean asking what it would feel like to be swept in, pulled down. Salvatierra’s poems met me at the horizon of grief and awe.
In my own study and reading practice, I have been obsessed with the theme of caregiving. I am an oldest daughter, the right hand to a single parent of seven, and often found myself more comfortable sitting at the table with mothers trading woes of balancing work, school, and raising children. While my body hadn’t done the making of the little ones I reached for, I deeply understood the complete physical reorientation of my body—and the work of my body—belonging to others. I understand the feeling of having others depend on the safety, productivity, and stability of my body, even as I struggled not to combust. I wondered, as Salvatierra does, “What would happen if one of the rooms/ in my chest/ behind a bone fence erupts?”
What I only recently understood of myself, and what Salvatierra teaches me in Sons of Salt, is that as I try to rebuild a relationship to myself and my body that is not centered on caregiving, I must grieve the parts of me weathered by the mothering work: the aches and pains and strung-out nervous system, the shadowy hollows that a decade of fatigue can leave under the eyes that ask my reflection, “What happened to you?/ What happened to you?” (“Maria De Las Llamas & Her Sons”). As my life now requires me to be at the center, I am left unknowing of who I am, defining myself through this daughter-mothering. I grieve, and I grasp for a sense of self-worth beyond self-sacrifice. The grief is necessary and all consuming, as Salvatierra reminds us, “I will discover floods are exhausting & necessary/ for starting over.”
Layers and layers of imagery and repetition create the waves of this collection. From the prologue, the narrator shows us the splintering of her body, questioning the definition of self and what is left after the body’s miracle of building another life. This first poem asks what can be left of you when that new life leaves its first home—the exposure, the empty, “left on a shore/ unprotected.”
In the first section, titled “Volcanos,” Salvatierra primes us for experimentation with form, solidifies key themes, and sets the emotional pace of the collection. While it is the shortest section of the collection—only containing two poems—it introduces us to a recurring feeling: the pull between the present experience of the body and persistence of memory. In “Protection,” as a woman wakes into the blinding light of the sun, she asks “Am I dead?” and receives the response “yes and no” while receiving a distinct purpose “to return to the living &/ call out to them. Whoever hears you, guide &/ safeguard.” At the close of this poem, a bracketed section directly addresses the reader, signaling that the meaning of this dreamlike vision is inseparable from her sons. With this vision and mission, there’s a release to the forces of nature: to the deities of the ocean, the forces of wind, the burn and heal of salt, the mythology of crows. In the second poem, “What Maria Would Say to Herself,” there is an opening to the elements. Salvatierra writes of an empty space in the chest where “wake birds nesting on the veins.” Following this poem is a long footnote, which drops the reader deeply into memory. This memory finds her driving around in the early evening, searching for her son but perhaps maybe only chasing the shadow of a child. There’s a slow build of tension, a roiling, that will unfold in following sections as she searching for something or someone she recognizes. She searches for the answer of whether she should keep looking or whether to silence the mothering instinct.
In the section titled “Crows,” Salvatierra continues to teach us about the possibilities of form and uses lines to create and break box-like shapes as the narrator’s thoughts and emotions become less and less contained. It begins with the poem “Below the Horizon,” an almost complete box that contains the body of the poem and opens just its corner to let out a small phrase, like a droplet of water. Salvatierra uses line weight and bolding of the text to direct the eye and create a poem within the poem: “The Horizon/ An Infinite/Sky.” Following the visual of the initial poem, a second poem with the same title follows, written in a prose style. For a reader coming from a fiction background like I do, this feels like a grounding to the narrator’s emotional state; there is no space for misunderstanding here. Knowing that the metaphor she is building gives space for the reader to float into the sky, Salvatierra tethers us to earth and asks for recognition. For example, the partner poem to the first visual box poem (also titled “Below the Horizon”) holds out its hand, revealing:
[I feel like this often, like my body cut in half. My mind there above me & there
Below me – never here like being pulled in two different directions by two sons,
How each is born with their own set of tools: one with measuring tape, a pencil,
A notebook: the other,
A machete.
Two Paths
& a split in the road.]
In this poem (and all the following prose poems that are partnered with the visual ones), these wing-brackets seem to serve as footnotes, which Salvatierra uses directly in the opening poem. But as the reader is released deeper and deeper into this contemplative, emotional state, she plays with this form to take us out of formal structures. Rather than distancing these truths in footnotes, Salvatierra uses these bracketed prose poems to whisper memory, asking Do you understand? Do you see what I see? Can you feel it? As if an umbilical cord live with vessels and arteries, this partnering of visual and prose poem remind us that each sensation is connected to a body, and at each sensation there is the risk of severance.
This partnered visual and prose poems pattern of this section, each subsequent visual poem breaking the lines of the box more, fragmenting to a place that rejects this containment, until the narrator takes control of the form as they move beyond fear. By the poem “Of My Body,” the lines take the shape of a wing, a call to the crows, the body of the poem sunbursting from its middle. In the accompanying prose poems, these wing-brackets serve as footnotes, a pull back into memory.
The second section, titled “Volcanos,” takes us to the emotions that bubble under the surface, the ones that threaten to spill out. In both “Volcano” sections, I felt the narrator’s frantic search of “where do I find a home.” These poems acknowledge fear but also chase shadows. They tell us about the necessity of release. Salvatierra asks in multiple sections, questions to the self and to the reader: “what happened to you?” and “when is an internal strife better left unkempt?”
In two short parts that make up the section “Brothers of Salt,” Salvatierra shifts to the narration of the sons, “boys whose shadows/ have detached from the bottoms/ of our Vans & run away in the dark.” This collective voice moves through urban space, observing the way they are watched. This provides a shift in pacing and tone that is distinct from the other sections. Whereas in the other sections there is the constant floating into metaphor, this section feels like a clash into pavement, into a reality. Before exploring the possibility of her own release or untethering, the movement into the son’s voices give us a sense of their autonomy and ability to survive. As readers, we get to sit with this feeling of precariousness that the sons exude—as much full of fear as they are bravado. We see the pain of fatherlessness and the callous that it forms over them. There’s an attitude to this separation, which includes not only a separation from a sense of parental figures but a separation from belonging of any kind. Yet, Salvatierra doesn’t let us forget that callous forms from a wound—a wound that becomes bare as the section unfolds.
These poems claim the sons’ right to their cities, naming that “whatever beauty exists, exists for us too.” Salvatierra adds fuel to the incendiary energy that builds in part one with part two’s “An Off-The-Record Mexican American Cento,” which incorporates lines from twenty-one Mexican American male poets, creating a chorus beyond the son-shadows. In “Where is the Home That Belongs To Your Father, Yoru Brother, Your Sons?” Salvatierra writes:
I know my place, ese! – you are nothing like my father!
You have tossed me aside like an old toy and, like my father,
I know my location: la pinche migra at every pinche corner.
Yo soy Joaquin. Cuhatémoc. Nezahualcóyotl. Sword and flame of Cortés,
perdido en un mundo de confusión: Soy nadiense. Nada es mi patria.
Using several phrases in this section from Rodolfo Corky Gonzales’s “Yo Soy Joaquin,” Salvatierra evokes a sense of protest and rage. Together, these voices call to the absence of fathers, to a void of belonging that aches in the space left behind. They ask, “Does the wind have a home?”and tell us, “The land of skeletons is our home.” Toward the end of this section, with the poem “Why Do You Go Back To the Womb,” the sons seek that exact retreat, the safety from the wounds of the world. Here, Salvatierra’s mothering narrator interrupts with a direct address to the reader, again holding their hand: “Reader, what the young man is getting at here, is an important point.” She tells us she has tried to father these sons too. The close of this section is a visual poem where text becomes the box, expressing the overwhelm of this responsibility, of having to be everything all at once, of trying with all her might to keep a sense of herself while shielding these sons. In all caps, questions surround a series of SOS signals—a distress call, a drowning, and brilliantly, an abbreviation of the title. Taking us back to the purpose-fueled vision of one of the first poems, in “WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU,” she asks “IF YOU/ ARE NOT DEAD OR ALIVE, WHY ARE YOU HERE?” This crescendo of trapped, boiling over trauma makes the urgent case for her physical and spiritual liberation.
When Salvatierra brings us again to “Volcanos,” this time with the spirit of eruption, the acknowledgement of the need to surrender leads to a physical and mental break—the forceful reclamation of the body. The eruption is present and necessary, including the expelling of her tethered sons in the poem “A Volcano Erupting.” In this first visual poem of the section, a darkened box of text describes the son’s attempt back into the womb. The box is punctuated at the bottom with a small triangle, a volcano releasing clouds of ash. “Why do you / come back to / my womb / leave it” is inside a small white box inside of it, a flame of resistance, asserting her body as her own. Back into the ash of this volcano, she “yells to the body retreating into mine/ an entire mountain/ now inside another is ready to erupt.” The text beneath the triangle of volcano tumbles across the bottom of the page and grounds the reader in the fear and necessity of being separated. The rest of this section traces the tendrils of smoke that follow this realization. In this smoke, Salvatierra’s moves again between the imagery of the poem and the direct ask of the reader to understand—one sentence gut punches that evaporate into the air.
In the following section, “In the Distance,” Salvatierra grounds the reader in the grief that can both precede and follow release. This pain is heartbreak as much as it is physical, such as an ache in the shoulder that the narrator notices and is later absorbed by her own mother. The mythology of the Marias (Maria de la Tierra, Maria del Viento, María de las Llamas) brings us through this section, with bright red boxes that are oriented in different ways, perhaps a call to the spirit of the four directions.
“Ocean,” the closing section, prepares for flight. A poem with text placed askew on the page in both Spanish and English, “No tengo miedo / I am not afraid” is followed by another poem that arches down the page, asserting “the body IS.” This poem alludes to the crows that wait alongside for ascension, crows that gather with the narrator in one of the last poems, where the lines that were once a box, become wings.
Salvatierra’s poems embody the spirit of reclamation, reminding us to ask the wind and water to carry us, to remember our potential for flight. Our bodies are containers—heavy, salty, life-giving miracles that will and wish to return to the earth. In the space in time we have, how do we both care for the flesh (ours and our kin) and understand the boundless capacity of our spirits?
