In A Face Out of Clay (The Center for Literary Publishing 2024), Brent Ameneyro’s ease of language lends each poem a quietness that nevertheless reverberates with that murmur at the heart of the spirit of duende, which Lorca said is “not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.” There is a secret force at work in the book that is responsible for the pulse we feel in our veins. Our involvement in the world of practical concerns makes us forget the sound of it and the sound of our hearts. Ameneyro invites readers to step from the noise of our everyday life into aesthetic contemplation—to unearth a portrait of the artist Ameneyro has left in shards.
In the title poem to the collection, Ameneyro writes, “Always start with the tongue— / give it a fold down the middle / so the viewer will know / it must carry the weight of language.” Ameneyro, raised in the States and having lived in Mexico, explores how individuals navigate inherited and fractured cultural identities. On the one hand, there’s an embrace of multilingualism, evident in the poems’ transitions between English and Spanish (untranslated), as well as in their geographic multiplicity, with references to a childhood spent in both the United States and in the shadows of the volcanoes, Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. Yet poems like “Choose Your Own Adventure” complicate this embrace, asking us to imagine living in a new country where “you try and speak but a giant moth / crawls out of your mouth.” The irony is rich: The experience of falling short of comprehension in this poem is offset by the older, mature poet’s use of the English to communicate that experience.
The collection is aware of itself as a site of mending in the aftermath of encounters that split the tongue and the self—a project that I find compelling in light of my duality as the son of Mexican immigrants, who was born in the States, who spent time in Mexico during childhood, and who pivoted from one language to the other daily as I stepped out the door for school or entered my grandmother’s household in Michoacán to have a prayer said over me. Readers should expect to be delighted by a poet who touches subtly yet incisively on the friction between the different selves we become, moving between languages and nations.
“Tectonics” employs an innovative form that visualizes linguistic duality through spatially arranged text blocks. Where there are words missing in the upper half of the narrative there are words found in the lower half, in a spatial balance that resembles tectonic plates colliding and falling away fragmented:
(“Tectonics [it’s easy not to talk about blood]”)
Lines such as, “the earth / her skin / tickled / by our movement / país a país,” create an intimate portrait of migration. At a time when the topic of migration is divisive in the United States, this poem redefines it as an intimate way of getting to know the earth and the promises on its horizon, which neutralizes the reader and allows for her to appreciate what’s only inevitable: There will be movement among us.
The poet is not a singularity and is overwhelmingly in the world, among others, even when they are in a room with the windows shut to keep out the noise. Ameneyro’s most profound moments emerge when he shifts from singular “I” to collective “we.” In the epistolary, “To My Ancestors,” Ameneyro says:
We’ve grown about four inches over the last
one hundred and fifty years (I thought you’d like
to know). We’ve made these weapons that
could end all life (sorry). We carry candlelight
in our pockets. Well, I can’t explain it all
but there’s a sense the end is near.
My friend (may I call you that? The salt
of the earth), I want to know the things you feared,
I want to know if anything has changed.
Have we always been such simple water
creatures grabbing anything in reach, scared
the sun will suck us into the sky? My father
doesn’t like to talk about what’s gone,
that’s why I hide you under my tongue.
Notice that the poem uses everyday speech, which is characteristic of Ameneyro’s tone and style. An apparent simplicity masks sophisticated craft, allowing for blunt statements to echo with philosophical depth. “My father / doesn’t like to talk about what’s gone,” writes Ameneyro. The reader is left with a choice to make, about what that line means to them. This openness and readiness for interpretation enriches the experience. A reader may sit and pore over the verses, as if the poetic subject conceals itself just when one draws near to it. I found myself asking, What exactly is hidden by the end of the poem? One possibility is that the speaker is reckoning with a loss, in something like an elegy to a culture or language that they nevertheless treasure and hold dear to them. I feel this way when reflecting on how far removed I am from the colorful heritage and vibrant storytelling my parents grew up with in Mexico and that they imparted on me, but over which I don’t have the same authority. Yet I know I’m inextricably linked to it, by my blood, by my memory. The difficult truth being hinted at here is that the experience is a synthesis of feeling that something’s been gained and that something’s been lost.
One may locate in Brent Ameneyro’s collection what is called duende, a theory developed by Federico García Lorca during the 20th century in his essay, “Theory and Play of the Duende.” In the essay Lorca quotes the flamenco singer Manuel Torre: “‘All that has dark sounds has duende’”; then writes, “Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art” (tr. by A.S. Kline; Casanovas and Lynch Agencia Literaria). Ameneyro’s poems are spun from the mire of encounters in the streets of Mexico, as in the poem “Roots”:
The volcano that was erupting is erupting
again, the ash that turned my tears into
cactus milk
is soaking into the roots of the Mexican juniper.
…are spun from nightmares, as in “The Chairman”—a poem about a roommate who recounts a tale from his amateur wrestling days, drunkenly hitting his head with a metal chair in demonstration. Notice the poem balances the narrative form with the lyric form, using the right images to quickly get to the point of the story:
The fourth hit came
and with it little specks
of blood.
By now we were all
silent. No laughing.
No clapping.
The dog outside
stopped barking.
The car with loud subwoofers
shut off.
The unmistakable noise
of his skull crashing
against the metal chair
reverberated well
into the night,
followed me into my dreams
where I dreamt I was the captain
of a ship; all my crew was sick,
hungry, and tired,
and I kept looking out
into the horizon
as the ship slapped
the tall waves
over and over.
The spirit of duende is strengthened with Ameneyro’s ability to write lyrics in light of otherwise difficult experiences—including the death of a loved one. Poet and critic Francisco Aragón noted in the collection, “a moving elegy for a loved one who ‘blew the napkins off the table / when she opened her wings.’” The elegy Aragón references is “What Happens After,” wherein Ameneyro remembers the scents and colors of his grandmother’s food—Mayté has passed away, yet in the poem she remains ‘in the wings.’ Similarly, in the poem, “Dad Telling Stories,” Ameneyro celebrates his father, whose mustache is here “a mourning dove” and there “a feathered snake,” and whose life is likened to “a paper boat / floating down a river”—an appropriate image in light of the speed with which a parent ages.
An arresting example of protest to the violence with which time sweeps us into tomorrow is the poem “Outside The Observable Universe.” Death is on the horizon. The speaker of the poem admits, “Some say there’s nothing out there / others say there’s more of the same.” Then the speaker provides a detailed account of what lay in that unknowable region, claiming, “If they [as in any one of us] were to travel there— / past all the cold empty space / …they’d find a garden / where nature no longer consumes / itself…” There is an echo of the Nietzschean conception of the eternal return when it is suggested that what is waiting for us beyond the observable universe is a garden that bears resemblance to a platonic garden and to the garden in Genesis: incorruptible, absolute. As though we were on a feedback loop, everything will be made new again in what will be “more of the same.” The speaker pictures “the travelers” having discovered “something or someone / that looks… just like them / like how they’d always pictured themselves / in their dreams.” The closing couplets are characterized by a digressive movement, and allow the speaker to guide the reader out of the poem:
They spend hours lying down, looking up
at the clouds, imagining they’re taking
the shape of their favorite memories,
something like kids playing on a swing set
or a woman in a shirt two sizes
too big with the sleeves hanging over
her hands, her bare feet dancing
across the sky.
While Brent Ameneyro’s debut collection displays care for poetic form and theory, what wins me over as a reader are the moments when the poet speaks from deep within themself, to pen verses that have the color of the subterranean to them. Poetry that engages life in all its dimensions is poetry about death, loss, decay—about the individual as they relate to a world in shards, where languages collide and where there seems to be anything but the time to mend the self, which is similarly in pieces. When I read A Face Out of Clay, and the words are in symmetry with life, and I’m able to breathe
