Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's Beast Meridian Reviewed at Latino Book Review

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's debut collection, Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017), is reviewed at Latino Book Review. "Dealing with family, ancestry, heredity, illness, and migration, Beast Meridian is situated in the borderlands, in what Gloria Anzaldúa calls an 'unstable, unpredictable, precarious' place," writes Rodney Gomez. More from this review:

Drawn from a well of remembrance, these poems resist comprehension and demand to be cut loose from the page, declaiming their wildness in a variety of forms and figurative techniques. Language here is used not only to disrupt expectations—to surprise and delight—but to discover/uncover a reality that would have otherwise remained hidden. In prose poems, excision, palimpsest, ekphrasis, litany, photographs, and many other strategies, Villarreal develops her own philosophy of witness and creates a collection of documentation and testimony: “I am returned to beg back / this amber music / written in me”. (“Crossover Album”)

Beast Meridian calls on us to reconsider our prior notions of what a book of Latinx poetry can do with familiar themes. Readers will discover something like a profound historical document... 

Read on at Latino Book Review!