Krystal Languell Reviews Rosa Alcalá's Productive MyOther Tongue

Poet and publisher Krystal Languell reviews Rosa Alcalá's MyOther Tongue (Futurepoem Books, 2017) for Hyperallergic. "Perhaps these poems are most frequently concerned with depicting the development of skills in response to urgent or unexpected circumstances," writes Languell. More:

MyOther Tongue offers up an elderly mother’s particular, business-like attributes for consideration in an extended meditation on her work ethic. But what does this potentially troubling phrase “work ethic” mean? It could be invoked as praise, but it just as likely might be a classist judgment, offering coded language for knowing one’s place in the hierarchy. For this speaker, who is pulled just as strongly toward the life of the body as to the life of the mind, which she has chosen to pursue, the conflict between the two paths can be difficult to negotiate.

Alcalá’s poetry narrates this conflict through the forms of the mothering and laboring body, whose knowledge is written in its muscles. The poem “My Body’s Production” illustrates a kinship between Alcalá and poet-journalist-novelist Muriel Rukeyser, whose incorporation of transcribed testimony in The Book of the Dead and elsewhere prefigures documentary poetics as we understand it in the United States, by folding into its form a brief, italicized question-and-answer. Testimony on textile factory working conditions and symptoms of illness looms beside description of the speaker’s bodily changes due to birth and breastfeeding in Alcalá’s poem. Breastfeeding is, of course, work, but also makes the body a factory...

Find the full review here.