The New Yorker Accompanies Javier Zamora

The New Yorker shines its light on Salvadoran-born poet Javier Zamora, whose debut collection, Unaccompanied, is just out from Copper Canyon. "These poems came to him in short, uncontrollable bursts; they were memories he didn’t realize he had," writes Jonathan Blitzer. More:

...The poems are written in a searching, confessional style, in which their author recalls his life as though he is in conversation with the people who helped to shape it. He addresses his grandparents, in El Salvador, who survived the country’s civil war at great personal cost; for Zamora, the violence of the war years was refracted through memories of his grandfather’s subsequent rages (“We’re all running / from the sun on his machete. / The moon on his gun”). Another cycle of poems adopts the perspective of Zamora’s parents in order to describe their coming of age—and their tortured decision to leave for the United States without him. “To tell you I was leaving / I waited and waited / rethinking first sentences in my sleep, / I didn’t sleep,” Zamora writes in one poem, signed “Dad, age 19.” Those “sentences” of forewarning went unsaid at the time, and so Zamora imagines them for himself. In another poem, titled “Second Attempt at Crossing,” he recalls a long-gone stranger who saved his life on the final leg of his journey. “I jumped on your shoulders / and we ran from the white trucks, then their guns,” he writes. “I’ve never thanked you.”

“Unaccompanied” is structured around a refrain from one of Zamora’s favorite poets, the late Salvadoran writer and revolutionary Roque Dalton. Midway through the book, he quotes Dalton in Spanish; at the end, he translates the same passage into English: “My country, you don’t exist / You’re only a bad silhouette of mine / a word I believed from the enemy.” In Zamora’s incantation, these lines are addressed not to one country but two. “Stupid Salvador,” he writes, “you see our black bags, our empty homes / our fear to say: the war has never stopped, and still you lie / and say: I’m fine.” And then there is the United States, the land of “La Migra,” “drybacks,” and “deportation letters.” “I’ll never be a citizen,” Zamora declares in the collection’s opening poem. “I can’t go back and return.” Without the proper papers, you can’t leave the U.S. because you won’t be allowed back in. But the legal bind underlines a deeper question: If you are both profoundly American and inescapably Salvadoran, can you ever feel like you belong fully to either country?

 Find the full piece right here.