Tanner Stening
Review of The Blue Mimes
by Sara Daniele Rivera
Graywolf Press, 2024
In Sara Daniele Rivera’s debut collection The Blue Mimes, Goya’s monsters etch themselves onto an 11-year-old girl’s limbs; a father and daughter translate Alejandra Pizarnik, the great Argentinian lyricist and expat who died by suicide at age 36. Every now and then, line-drawn pits from lucuma, an exotic fruit, converse across media, from text to visuals and back, in poems whose central impulse is one of letting the intellect finish its sentence; that is, even if Rivera herself, warily committed to the personal lyric (“A lullaby opens a rift, and in comes the cold”), hardly ever flattens completely into the realm of ideas. When she does, the poems come lightly footnoted, with the features of a personal canon. “Baudelaire wrote that winter enhances the poetry of the house,” we’re told; then, sometime later, in “Tranströmer’s ‘The Blue House,’ the dead repaint the walls and watch from the outside in.”
In darting fragments that open to “soft interiors,” Blue Mimes broods on contemporary solidarities and horrors, including the migrant experience in an epoch bookended by the Trump administration); childhood memories reconfigured by loss (“Admit it: you were the child who cried too much”); the still-unmapped compartments of the self; and the exhaustion of domestic habit and familial intimacy as sites of meaning, respite, and connection. Between the poet’s own line art, the bits of augmentative Spanish, the use of bracketed prose blocks, there’s enough variety to keep a reader alert to sudden shifts of tone and form (and, if you’re like me, reflexively consulting Google Translate).
Following the loss of her father, Rivera holds up under a series of gut-punches, such that what you get in this collection are poems of necessity. In lieu of flashy tricks and evasions, what’s sought is a foundation to stand on. But setting the tone is hard, and probably beside the point. After a slightly wobbly takeoff—the debris of a wreckage imaginatively repackaged (“a contained wreckage”) as its own debris field—Rivera finds the right key: a spectral plainspokenness, one at pains to avoid sentimentality’s undertow for a more measured look at loss. Rivera, in turn, likes to circumvent syntax, opting for the kind of muted exposition of someone trying to square death’s unqualified “stillness” with the exacting “cosmic change” left in its wake:
I spoke. You. Sound converted and delivered.
We smiled and spoke.
If we were closer, we say when we’re apart.
If I tell you my body is full of stone caves
you understand the sadness there.
Unlike Goya’s gadabout girls “who don’t want to stay home,” Rivera is a homebody for whom grief has compounded the tension between the home as both a physical place (here, Albuquerque) and an idea that spans geographies with ethno-generational resonances (“We make imaginary plans for Havana. / Dream of meeting Leonardo Padura on a terrace somewhere”). Shaken out of the fragile equilibrium between present habitation and perpetual homesickness—a feeling no doubt familiar to second-generation immigrants—Rivera gropes at familiarity in numb wanderings, finding disjuncture and breakage everywhere she looks. Like a “dark stain / [that]
blossoms on your face,” the blurry Rorschachs of memory—coming and going, as they do—are sometimes met with fresh processing:
As a child I remember
you kept a doll
in the annex window, staring
back into the main house to face
intruders, and in my mind
its yellow eyes fade.
Rivera’s grief, conspicuous as a signpost in the desert (“I want to believe death is only a pause / in our continuous language”), has a way of affirming her search for renewal (“Every day lift new smells from the earth”). Disappointments also rouse: “I always believed I / walked multiple / worlds but I lived / in pretranslation, / waiting for names to / drop into my mouth.” In an interregnum marked by “a loss of / dimensionality,” the challenge is to “always find / space to occupy.” The dark stain had “tunnel[ed] inward,” becoming “a blankness in your brain;” and while fluency in two languages may help metabolize loss across the scattered multitudes of oneself (“we have / two languages with which to approximate one pain”), so much of what it means to straddle cultures is mediated, shaped, or defined by a single individual:
My friend from Havana says all Cubans have this quality, como un sass, un humor, tu sabes. I ask if I have it. He laughs. He, at least, thinks I’m enough.
My understanding of an entire country came from a single person: you were Cuba to me.
[. . .]
I am you, sometimes you are you. This is all I know of collective identity.
Over the course of the book, Rivera builds toward a personal theory of survival—one in which grief, language, memory, and heritage all figure thematically. As part of that effort, whether by design or not, she locates “a poetry of the house” for which household objects function as proxies for grief’s dissociative effects. (Baudelaire himself had been fuguing out on psychotropics when he penned the line about winter in Les Paradis Artificiels.) For Rivera, occupying space doesn’t serve so much to stabilize reality as provide the self with temporary shelter in “unfamiliar landscapes,” bringing to mind Ann Sexton’s own bid for peace in “The Room of My Life:” “However, nothing is just what it seems to be. / My objects dream and wear new costumes.”
Surrounded by confessions that end not in placidity but madness and oblivion (“I would like to live in order to write,” Pizarnik wrote), Rivera successfully persuades herself, and likely her reader, that things are constitutionally otherwise, miming with equal parts composure and dolor into an aria of acceptance (“I am continuing past you. / The changes are changes / I have to catalog”). Implicitly, she refuses Pizarnikian fatalism while exhibiting a kindred appreciation of those for whom, as Hölderlin is supposed to have said in a letter, “poetry is a dangerous game.”
Rivera hardly tiptoes around dangers both present and lurking, having wandered through the valley of loss and returned with the insight and tenderness of someone who tries “not to be a bad association,” who “likes my shrunken / ascetic space,” who imagines themself “a light source held in a window”; and thus when “people walk past at night[,] they might feel nostalgic without knowing what’s going on inside.” Tenderness, once part of a happy fabric, is nearly always qualified upon reflection: “We fit on a twin daybed each in one of Dad’s arms. In unfamiliar landscapes her breath is the only signal that nothing is coming.” Other times, it is part of a hopeful half-theory: “All we know is what houses us, what tenderness speaks to us. The part of the lullaby that descends into melodic need. Possibilities of contact.”
A student of Louise Glück, here and there Rivera echoes her late teacher, if slightly perpendicularly: “We needed / to walk an uneven line / away from our bodies,” we’re told, recalling Glück’s “the one continuous line / that binds us to each other.” Of course, for Glück poetry wasn’t dangerous, whatever chronic unhappiness it seemed to betray. On more than one occasion, Rivera gives us the mechanism for what it says not just about the perversities of self-preservation, but its incidental pleasures:
You’re comforted by the symmetry
of your smallest wounds, how
you can keep scratching them open
and have a little composition
to keep you company.
These moments possess both the tenor and presence of Max Ritvo as well as the measured quiet of Catherine Barnett. One suspects that Rivera—not quite the scorpion she wanted to be, not quite the fox she once was (holding “hard to [her] sources of protection”)—would likely dismiss the idea that poetry should be uplifting or therapeutic without denying that it offers escape. In that sense, Blue Mimes is a strange comfort.