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Books Review Letters From Latin America

Reviews of poetry collections by Maia Elsner and Andres N Ordorica

OVERRUN BY WILD BOARS (Flipped Eye, £6,95) is British Latinx author Maia Elsner’s debut poetry collection. Multilayered and ambitious, it explores the nuances of family histories, migration, belonging, genocide and love.

The poet, who was born in London to Mexican and Polish Jewish parents, manages to create a work that is as lyrically beautiful as it is formally exciting — it encompasses elegies and ghazals to sestinas, sonnets and poems inspired by art and architecture.

The book is filled with vibrant coloured birds, with Polish and Mexican stories of loss, strength and redemption, as well as explorations of what it means to live between cultures and languages.

In For My Mother, she traces a bloodline that connects her with her Mexican-born mother, and by doing so to Latin America, its myths, landscapes and native dialects:
“This early hour, you wonder / what the hummingbird says/to the heron of its / migration. Now the church is sinking / through the torn-up streets/of Coyoacan.” The poem ends with a poignant line: “a bird begins / with me still wondering what part of you / I lose each day to another / language, another song.”
 
I was particularly struck by the series of poems that tell the harrowing story of Elsner’s Polish Jewish grandmother, who we learn manages to escape from the Czestochowa ghetto in occupied Poland just before its liquidation by the Nazis on September 22 1942.

It is perhaps that historical, temporal and geographical distance that allows the poet to delve deep into a history of persecution, anti-semitism and survival, as well as exploring notions of multiple faiths, family traditions and bloodlines.

In Christmas in Diaspora, one of my favourites in the collection, Elsner writes that while lighting the Chanukah candles as a yearly tradition, the family remembers “Babcia [granny], with her fake / Costa Rican papers / as she crosses to the Christian quarter / and for this is granted / entrance / There is room at the inn […] May I be free from suffering / as the she-boar shudders off / its hurting and the tiger bite / births new skin.”

Elsner, like the wild boar of the Polish mythology and the tiger from the Mexican cosmogony, balances pain and renewal in a stunning and important debut collection. A brilliant book by one of the most exciting voices from the British Latinx family of poets.
 
At Least I Know is another exciting debut collection by Andres N Ordorica (404 Ink, £9,99), a queer US Latinx poet of Mexican heritage based in Edinburgh. He has written a book that examines with honesty and clarity notions of nationhood and queerness, as well as of bilingualism, xenophobia and being Latino, among other themes.

In For Papa (For Daddy), Ordorica writes tenderly about his migrant father, his native Chihuahua state and the filial love that ultimately binds them together: “You were an alondra belting out corridos / from a time gone by-a Mexico that preceded me […] Between yo honeyed notes, warm timbre, / I found our definition of love.”

For Ordorica love “is a songbird that flies many thousands of miles / to find home in the heart of another.”

In moving poems about gay love, Ordorica uses simple yet powerful language to convey ideas of romance, friendship and same-sex marriage. As in It had Been So Long where he reminisces about his wedding day with his Scottish husband: “how we flung / open the door, / greeted by music. / Walking side by side, / as we went/from who we were / to who we became/after ‘I do.’ / I realised we were / at the beginning, / when we said, / till death do us part, / in sickness and in health.”

In Bennachie, Ordorica recounts a tender moment with his partner atop the famous hill in Aberdeenshire, Scotland: “You showed me the land, / said, ‘this made me’. / You pointed to the river, / understood it to be yours […] I longed to know a land like that, / close enough to feel at home / and for that home to love me back / like I was her one and only son.”

A highly recommended book that stays with you long after you read it.

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