Matadora
Because, sweetheart, your iPod still won't make the top of your head feel like it's been taken off, to quote that old-fashioned and still-radical poet, Emily Dickison. When I read Sarah Gambito's poetic debut, Matadora, I was devastated the way only poetry can bowl you over if you sit down for a minute and read with your heart and mind wide open.
With her nimble, inscrutable poems, Gambito tells us: poetry is to talk to God, make God talk and then talk back again to God ("Girlfriend found out / the need of God/ is God"). Poetry is to find our other self, our sister, our alter ego, our companion. Gambito's narrator makes sense of herself, and we readers make sense of life. Through her exchanges with Paloma de los Reyes--who seems to represent that part of the narrator that knows both far more and far less than herself. Paloma writes in her Light Journal precise articulations of selfhood: "Going to the movies alone. Saying to the ticket-lady, 'one please...' is a catharsis that is a gold leaf."
Gambito's words are a tumble of contradictions--and dangerous. She allows us to be at once visible and invisible, to shine in the silence and the darkness. To find release and freedom in the edge of danger, the depth of anger, in the theater of the bullfight where there is always death in the bull's steel breath. The poems put me tooth to tooth with vampires, wing to wing with angels, and fur to fur with selkies (those legendary creatures who shed their seal skin to become women). Gambito's poems leave out things that can't be (won't be?) said, mid-line, and we must live with the omissions, like in life.
I want everything I read--especially by poets of color--to acknowledge the political, to talk to me about what it's like to exist on the margins, to live in this American McWorld. Gambito doesn't write rhetoric--there is no 9/11 poem here. And yet, under layers of gorgeous language, I think I hear echoes, hints, nods and winks to the raging social critic in me. Is "Passage," with its cadences of Ginsberg, a political poem?: "I saw the best songs of my magician. A girl, three girls pay this toll out on macaw naval bases. Subic/Clark/Olongapo. These were splinted wings." I think so, but I'm not sure. Am I too taken with the rolling words and images to care?
Welcome to Gambito's "shrewd and beautiful" New York, where she tells us what we should all learn: "...I am more than just myself. I am my dreaming self / getting better at this."
There is great beauty and mortal danger in unremembered memories, yet-to-be thought thoughts, days we've almost forgotten. Matadora Gambito bravely uncovers them for us with words as flashing cape and poetry as iron-rich blood.
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