10/01/2018
Martinez (In the Garden of the Bridehouse) carefully arranges a series of aesthetic objects, stories, experiences, and analyses alongside each other in a third collection—a 2017 National Poetry Series Winner—that operates as a kind of conversational, hybrid genre exhibit. He begins with a short poem about President Trump (“servant who sweetens/ only mirrors”) and ends with poems about the death of a grandmother (“Beside the casket, I collect my tears”). Much of the work in between focuses on the othered, aestheticized bodies of Mexicans and other Latin Americans within American history. Martinez proceeds via an ekphrastic analysis of casta paintings (in which mixed-race people are the subjects), sideshow oddities, photographs of executions in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, Catholic iconography and prayer, and regional legend. The book operates in a manner akin to Martinez’s description of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe: “a poetic where the historical subject traverses through vanishing into the naked color identical in time to its embodied ‘self.’ ” Martinez employs an incantatory, short-lined lyricism alongside no small amount of prose, mining and appropriating the language of treaties and racialized nonfiction and juxtaposing them with his own poetic theory, personal and cultural experience, and concise examinations of objects, documents, and studies, before spilling back into verse. Martinez’s effort is largely a beautiful, personal, well-conceived, and historically contextualized indictment of empire, the aestheticization of biopolitics, and the white gaze. (Oct.)
Praise for Museum of the Americas:
"Diorama-like, this book displays what has been, in American culture, displayed, and thereby displaced. It is at once a natural history of American racism and colonialism, utterly devastating in its cumulative impact, and a gorgeous mash-up of genres and forms: bold, light, and ruthlessly smart." —Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker, "The Poetry I was Grateful for in 2018"
“This marvelous, argumentative and curiosity-provoking book is itself best thought of as a kind of corrective cabinet of wonders, one whose portraits and specimens complicate the dominant narratives of imperial conquest and control . . . Martinez’s approach is as brainy as it is entertaining, as political as it is personal.” —Kathleen Rooney, The New York Times Book Review
“Masterful . . . Martinez’s poems are dynamic personal doxologies of Mexican-American tradition and inheritance . . . Ambitious and historical, Martinez’s book earns praise.” — Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
“[A] fascinating hybrid collection that explores how current events reflect long-held prejudices about Mexicans and people of color.” —The Washington Post
“A beautiful, personal, well-conceived, and historically contextualized indictment of empire, the aestheticization of biopolitics, and the white gaze.” — Publishers Weekly
"[A] showcase for some smoldering linguistic skills and a powerful argument against racism." —The Santa Barbara Independent
“J. Michael Martinez’s visionary lyricism lands like a dark amber lightning bolt on the ivory blade of the American poetic genome, sparking a poesis of radiant mutations that we always dreamed possible—-but wondered if they could ever truly transpire. With echoes of Pound and Melville, Paz and Borges and more, he forges a sui generis poetics of mestizo becoming that ranges from anatomizing pre-Columbian deities to memories of his Mexican American grandmother’s funeral, with all of the atrocities and wonders that have passed between. Museum of the Americas offers a borderless American Genesis story that begins in Tenochtitlán, rather than Plymouth Rock. It feels like a tale we’ve been waiting to be told.” — John Phillip Santos
“This is a fascinating, layered collection of poetry that blurs genre in some really interesting ways. Martinez offers, as the title suggests, a museum of the Americas, and especially engages with Mexican migration and its effect on the body. Given the goings on of the world, this poetry is especially timely. Every piece in this book offers something beautiful or haunting or illuminating; every thought, every word, every image is precisely rendered.” — Roxane Gay
“J. Michael Martinez may call this stunning collection a museum, but once you enter, it’ll feel more like a dip into a repository of fun house mirrors; our entwined histories here are pushed, pulled, elongated, and always reflected straight back, with laser sharpness, to the reader’s gaze. It is a book perfectly crafted to meet the complicated days we are living through.” — Cornelius Eady
"J. Michael Martinez’s poetics is at once direct, critically incisive, and aesthetically adventurous. This collection is brimming with the enigma of social agency as manifested through culture. Museum of the Americas stands as a beacon for how the impulse towards radical democratic vision and practices can be tracked by a bold reformatting of historicity that speaks to our current moment.” — Rodrigo Toscano
"The book’s larger cultural issues will get a lot of attention, and they should, as they deepen the conversation, but what has stayed with me most are the very personal poems in this book, about Martinez and his father and his grandmother, which serve as great tributes to their lives." — Alex Dueben, The Rumpus
