Tripas

Tripas: Poems by Brandon Som
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Christopher Spaide in Poetry Foundation's review https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr... writes of this book: "
Aristotle, Li Po, Ezra Pound: these are among the cited sources of Brandon Som's The Tribute Horse (2014), whose textual collages map the arduous passage of Chinese migrants and poetry to North America. With Tripas: PoemsTripas (2023), Brandon Som turns his attention to histories, plural: toxic dumping in Phoenix, Arizona; a father’s “nine-year fight with cancer”; a Chicana grandmother’s work inspecting circuits for the earliest Motorola cellphones. Those latter devices are forerunners to Brandon Som’s poetic instrument, his “Teléfono Roto”—literally, a broken telephone; idiomatically, the children’s game telephone. Both are ways of communicating through mishearing, translating signal and noise into surprises of sense and sound..."cries Llorona from those little phones inside our pockets" and Motorola moved to Guadalajara after the manufacturer was fined and their Phoenix location was declared a Superfund site.
Very moving and powerful verse.


View all my reviews