Reviewing Natalie Scenters-Zapico's Lima :: Limón

At The Rumpus this week, Julie Marie Wade looks into Natalie Scenters-Zapico's second collection, Lima :: Limón, and considers all the reasons one might pick up a book of poetry in the first place: a fondness for the publishing house, the resounding ring of the book's title, the cover, or the author herself. Wade expresses admiration for all these features with Natalie Scenters-Zapico's latest, writing:

I recently picked up a copy of Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s second poetry collection, Lima :: Limón, for all of these reasons. For some years now, I’ve been an avid reader of books published by Copper Canyon Press. I’ve come to crave the lush density and maturity of risk that forms the ethos of this press.

There’s also the fact that I love colons and by extension, analogies, so here’s a title that’s already as intellectually engaging and enigmatic (“Lime is to lemon…”) as it is prosodic and alliterative (Lima :: Limón). The words actually taste like the fruits they are!

The book’s cover is black and white, with a dramatic photograph spanning the upper half. In it, a dark-haired woman in a white dress (which on closer inspection appears to be a man’s collared shirt stretched over her hips and waist, cinched with a belt) wearing black gloves poses on a white tabletop beside dark pepper, light salt, and a tall white dispenser of sugar. There are two men in the background, but it’s only the woman’s face we see clearly—her eyes peering down at us, her audience, with avian precision.

Some things this cover already imparts to me: Lima :: Limón is a woman-centered book, as the woman here is front and center, unabashed in her beauty and her strength, unintimidated by the prospect of confrontation.

It is a book about contrasts, too, signaled by the grayscale of the title, the bright white of the author’s name beneath it, then both of these made brighter by the black backdrop against which they are placed. One man in the background faces forward, but his visage is blurry, as is his body. The other man sits in a chair, his eyes closed, his face visible only in profile.

There's more to find beyond the cover at The Rumpus.