Contemporary Authors

• Dulce: Poems Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 2018
• Cenzontle: Poems BOA Editions (Rochester, NY), 2018

1. Cenzontle : poems LCCN 2017044816 Type of material Book Personal name Hernandez Castillo, Marcelo, 1988- author Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Cenzontle : poems / Marcelo Hernandez Castillo ; foreword by Brenda Shaughnessy. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Rochester, NY : BOA Editions, Ltd., 2018. Description 108 pages : 1 illustration ; 23 cm. ISBN 9781942683537 (pbk. : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3608.E76845 A6 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Dulce : poems LCCN 2017038965 Type of material Book Personal name Hernandez Castillo, Marcelo, 1988- author. Main title Dulce : poems / Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Published/Produced Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018. Projected pub date 1804 Description pages cm ISBN 9780810136960 (pbk. : alk. paper)

• Marcelo Hernandez Castillo - https://www.marcelohernandezcastillo.com/

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  Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of Cenzontle, which was chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. prize and will be published by BOA editions in 2018. His first chapbook, DULCE, was chosen by Chris Abani as the winner of the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize and will be published by Northwestern University press in the fall of 2018. His memoir, Children of the Land is forthcoming from Harper Collins.

  He was born in Zacatecas, Mexico and immigrated at the age of five with his family to the California central valley. As an AB540 student, he earned his B.A. from Sacramento State University and was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. He is a founding member of the Undocupoets campaign which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country and was recognized with the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” award. Through a literary partnership with Amazon Publishing he has helped to establish The Undocupoet Fellowship which provides funding to help curb the cost of submissions to journals and contests.

  ​

  A graduate of the Canto Mundo Latinx Poetry fellowship, he has also received fellowships to attend the Vermont Studio Center and the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop. He lectures at Sacramento State University and teaches summers at The Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

  ​

  He is the translator of the Argentinian modernist poet, Jacobo Fijman and is currently at work translating the poems of the contemporary Mexican Peruvian poet Yaxkin Melchy. He co-translated the work of the Mexican poet Marcelo Uribe with C.D. Wright before her untimely passing.

  His work has been adopted to Opera through collaboration with the composer Reinaldo Moya and has appeared in The New York Times, PBS Newshour, Fusion TV, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, New England Review, and Indiana Review, among others. He lives in Marysville, California, with his wife and son.

• PBS.org - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/poetry/how-poetry-helped-marcelo-hernandez-castillo-speak-out-on-immigration

  How poetry helped Marcelo Hernandez Castillo speak out on immigration
  Poetry Mar 14, 2016 11:30 AM EDT
  At a young age, language was Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s best defense.

  Growing up undocumented, Castillo said that fluency in English — and, later, poetry — were the tools with which he could protect against deportation. Writing was “a way to kind of offset any questions or any suspicions about my documentation status,” he said. “By way of fear, along came poetry.”

  Castillo, who entered the U.S. from Mexico with his family at the age of five, did not address his own story in writing until recently. After he received exemption from deportation under Deferred Action for Child Arrivals, a policy that applies to people who entered the U.S. before the age of 16 and before 2007, he became the first undocumented student to earn an MFA at the University of Michigan. And he returned to Mexico for the first time in 21 years.

  Those two experiences gave him a new perspective on the trauma that had pervaded his experience with the U.S. immigration system, he said.

  “It is very traumatic. It is a fear that is ingrained in you,” he said. “It wasn’t until much later in life that I began thinking in terms of my identity and how much that fear has caused.”

  Castillo’s poems now interrogate the systems that uphold fear and make experiences like his invisible. “People write about the river without seeing the bodies beneath. People write about a tree without seeing who’s been hung from its branches. To me, that erasure has to be purposeful,” he said.

  In “Immigration Interview with Jay Leno in the Desert,” Castillo examines the power dynamics inherent in interviews — a form of entertainment in media and pop culture, but also a method used by immigration authorities.

  “For me, an interview has a lot of menacing connotations,” he said. “The form of the interview is something I want to further investigate. [It’s] something that has different meaning for people just watching Jay Leno than someone who’s going up for an immigration interview.”

  The poem’s question and answer sections are profoundly disconnected, juxtaposing a talk show host’s breezy questions with images of a family crossing the U.S.-Mexican border.

  “These questions are one of the very first times that I’m trying to come back to that moment … when we crossed,” he said. “It’s probably one of the first instances in my writing when I tried to address that crossing.”

  You can read Castillo’s piece, or hear him read it, below.

  Immigration Interview with Jay Leno in the Desert

  What is your objective?
  llllllllTo return all the street lamps
  llllllllhidden by the boy’s gestures.

  How long do you plan on staying here?
  llllllllI don’t understand
  llllllllthe question.

  I said how long do you plan on staying here?
  llllllllThey would have drowned
  lllllllleven without our laughter.

  Is that really your name?
  llllllllYes, even the clothes on the dirt
  llllllllgroaned like some orchards in spring.

  Have you been here before?
  llllllllI choked on an empty sleeve
  llllllllwhere I thought an arm should be
  lllllllltrying to put his fingers in my mouth.

  Who are you wearing?
  llllllllThe woman gave birth in the dark.
  llllllllI thought I felt hands where there were none.

  llllllllEveryone dug a hole.

  Are you alone?
  llllllllNorth was whichever way
  llllllllthe mannequins were pointing.

  llllllllThe softest bone is the one
  llllllllthat will burn the longest.

  Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a Canto Mundo fellow, a Pushcart nominee and has received fellowships to attend the Squaw Valley Writer’s Workshop, and the Vermont Studio Center. He teaches summers as the resident artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida. He was a finalist for the New England Review Emerging Writer Award and his manuscript was a finalist for the Alice James Book Prize and the National Poetry Series. His poems and essays can be found in Indiana Review, New England Review, The Paris American, Gulf Coast and Southern Humanities Review among others. With Javier Zamora and Christopher Soto (AKA Loma), he initiated the Undocupoets campaign which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country. This poem originally appeared in Muzzle Mag.
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• Ploughshares - http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/poet-activist-spotlight-marcelo-hernandez-castillo/

  QUOTED: "The group began with Javier [Javier Zamora] and Loma [Christopher Soto] who were both attending NYU at the time. They had the initial ideas behind it and I asked if I could be a part of the group. Before hearing about their new proposed campaign, I tried to contact some organizations on my own in regards to their guidelines, but didn’t get far. Once I heard Javier and Loma were starting something more official, I was eager to join them."

  Poet Activist Spotlight: Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
  Author: Stevie Edwards |
  Oct
  13
  2016
  Posted In Interviews
  castillo-image

  Poet and essayist Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s work has appeared in Paris-American Review, Best American Poetry Blog, Ascentos, Muzzle Magazine, Jubilat, New England Review, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. He is a Canto Mundo fellow and has received fellowships from Squaw Writer’s Workshop and the Vermont Studio Center. Alongside Javier Zamora and Christopher Soto, he has worked to eliminate citizenship requirements in poetry contests and awards through a project called Undocupoets. Marcelo, who crossed the border through Tijuana with his family at the age of five, was the first undocumented student to graduate from the University of Michigan’s prestigious MFA program. In his essay “Poetry As a Passport,” he provides an intimate portrait of his improbable, almost epic journey into and through his MFA program. He illustrates the danger of traveling across the country undocumented to attend the university, the fear of telling the department about his undocumented status, and a series of bewildering barriers and uncertainties, such as the inability to receive a teaching stipend until the passing of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Since the essay’s publication in 2014, it has lingered with me as a sort of generous haunting. He tells a story that is often unheard, largely because of the very real hazards involved in voicing undocumented status.

  At the risk of romanticizing his work, I think that Marcelo Hernandez Castillo shows the tenacious imaginary capacity of poetry, how it can allow for a necessary revolution within the self, even when the world seems hopelessly cruel and slow. In his love poem “Cenzóntle,” Marcelo writes, “years from now / there will be a name / for what you and I are doing,” which, though weighted by a present lack, is ultimately future-building. I see a similar far-sighted, concerned fire in much of his interview responses below. He has an urgent insistence on holding himself and others to high standards. Maybe “high” isn’t the right word—having non-discriminatory literary contest rules should be a given and is not a high standard, but what I mean to say is that he demonstrates a relentless questioning, a persistent unwillingness to settle for the unacceptable.

  Stevie Edwards: Can you tell me a little about how Undocupoets got started? I’d also love to learn about any successes and obstacles you all have encountered since the initial petition was shared in Apogee in January 2015.

  Marcelo Hernandez Castillo: The group began with Javier [Javier Zamora] and Loma [Christopher Soto] who were both attending NYU at the time. They had the initial ideas behind it and I asked if I could be a part of the group. Before hearing about their new proposed campaign, I tried to contact some organizations on my own in regards to their guidelines, but didn’t get far. Once I heard Javier and Loma were starting something more official, I was eager to join them.

  Since we launched the initial petition, we successfully changed the citizenship requirements from every major first book poetry prize in the country. We collaborated with Southern Humanities Review for a special issue focusing on undocupoets and were fortunate to receive the Writers for Writers award from Poets & Writers in New York City. We are also excited about a new fellowship funded through Amazon which will grant scholarships to undocupoets to submit to the different prizes that are now open to them, and soon we will be announcing a new member to our team. However, with as much success that we saw, not every organization completely met our expectations. Some prizes stipulated certain caveats that still exclude people. Although it’s a change in the right direction, my only fear is that if we stop pushing back, then whatever flaws remain in some of the guidelines will be nearly impossible to change in the future. There’s probably a name for this that I can’t think of at the moment, but I’m afraid that people will see this as “enough,” and not consider any further action. So I’m hesitant to say we succeeded in changing everything that we originally set out to change. Yes, we’ve opened the doors for some undocumented poets to be heard, but still not everyone can participate. My biggest fear is that people will think this was a one time thing, rather than an ongoing process. What we achieved so far were only the first steps of a much longer plan. I just hope that presses and organizations won’t think that they have already done enough.

  What’s dangerous is that I think the next step will be ten times harder than the first. I can’t help but wonder what will happen if we ask more from them? What if we say that their applicants shouldn’t need TPS or DACA? Will they say that they have done enough? And that is what worries me. I feel like we need a second wave of resistance to adjust some of the guidelines that we are not content with, but it will be much more difficult. I’ve probably already gone on too long so I’ll end with that note.

  SE: How do you see the relationship between your poetry and the activist work you’re doing for undocumented people? Also, of all of the many spaces in which advocacy is needed on behalf of undocumented people in this country, is there something about poetry that makes it feel like an important place to focus your energy?

  MHC: To be honest, I don’t know where else to focus my energy. Everywhere else seems like an impenetrable wall. The poetry community feels like a space in which I can make real change because people are willing to work with us. I do think that most of the resistance we’ve gotten is out of lack of information and knowledge on behalf of the organizations. When I was at the border this summer dealing with some family problems, I felt absolutely helpless. Neither appeals to emotion, logic, or ethics could make my point across to border agents. Maybe I’m taking the easy route. But I don’t see it like that. I see it as my way of effecting the most change that I am capable of in an area where my voice is most likely to be projected. I would be less effective at on-the-ground community organizing. So, I too have always been riddled with the question of “am I doing enough?” I don’t want to say that one sector of advocacy in the undocumented experience is more important than another—for example, legal advocacy work, food pantries, and immigrant labor rights. I feel very close to those individuals enacting change in their respective fields; I’m just working in the space that I can enact the most change. To be honest, I wish I had the strength that some community organizers have. All my praise goes out to them.

  SE: In your essay “Poetry As a Passport” in BuzzFeed, you challenge the label of “Latino Poetry,” noting: “Binaries used to define an aesthetic (such as: is it Latino or not) serve only to limit and exclude creative possibilities and emerging voices. It’s wrong to think there exists only one form of Latino poetry.” I was wondering if you feel that there’s a pervasive aesthetic box Latino writers are frequently pressured (or assumed) to inhabit? If so, what does that box look like? What are some of its limitations?

  MHC: I feel like this essay is a growing thought process and changes over time. At the time I wrote it, I did feel like an explicit binary existed, defining something as either-or. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist now but maybe these were internal anxieties about my own poetry, rather than a nuanced survey/observation of Latinx poetry in the US. Now, I’m not sure if I said that the binary “does” exist versus, “it’s wrong to think of one as possibly existing, or investing our critical vocabulary into an idea of a binary.” I guess I’m not making much sense. I’m trying to type this in a room full of chatty teenagers. But I’ve given this a lot of thought lately. Do we project this binary on Latinx poets or do we extrapolate it from the work recently produced? And who do I mean by “we?” Is it within the Latinx literary community or the larger Facebook regulated literary community? Maybe I’m growing and so I’m constantly changing what I think about my role and the Latinx role in American poetry. So maybe there is a box, but maybe it’s a transparent box and it’s a privilege to be able to see through it—into it. Maybe it’s a ghost or a mirror. I’ve always been bad at analogies.

  Whatever you want to call it, or however you want to describe it, I think the point is that Latinx writers are at once challenging this aesthetic and uplifting it. But why is this only asked of us, or of POC in general, as if we’re the only ones who can be pigeonholed into these narrow definitions? I was in a room once with other Latinx poets and one proclaimed that he was fed up with white poets submitting poems to a journal he helps edit that were spilling over with Classical Greek mythology references. Like, we get it, you want to be Anne Carson. Not everyone can be Anne Carson, in fact only Anne Carson can be Anne Carson, to be honest. So, I guess I’m wondering why this question is always asked of POC. I feel like it’s a question that has already answered itself. I feel like it has already implied what it wants to hear, and has dismissed how I would like to answer it. Don’t get me wrong, though. I feel like it’s a necessary question, but I would also like to hear how white poets might also be boxed in a rigid definition of subject such as references to classical mythology, meta wikipedia references, brambles, hollyhocks, and cottonwoods or hemlock trees? I mean, I say this jokingly but also with a bit of truth? Why do we see that as the default from which things can diverge?

  SE: In “Poetry As a Passport,” you also claim that you initially got into poetry because you were “in love with a girl named Rubi.” I might posit that without teenage infatuations, half of us wouldn’t be doing this poetry thing. I was wondering if you’d say the ways in which you turn to poetry have changed since then?

  MHC: In a way I’m always and still writing because I’m in love with a girl named Rubi. The only difference now is that she’s my wife, and we’re not in high school anymore. Where would we be without memories of our angsty teenage selves? I didn’t really answer your question but in a way I think I did. I don’t turn to anything new just because I’ve received formal training in poetry, whatever that may be. Well, that’s a lie. While in high school and college I was trying to write about someone who I was not. So in a way maybe I have changed, but only changed to the points of reference in my life before I thought about becoming a poet. Those moments in which I’ve come to see as my truest self.

  SE: This might not sound like a super intellectual question, but does it still make you feel afraid writing and/or publishing poems and essays about your undocumented status? Also, without DACA, do you think your writing would be significantly different?

  MHC: Well, to clarify, I recently received my permanent resident status. I’m not a citizen yet but receiving my green card was bitter sweet. That doesn’t mean I’m not still afraid, either for myself or my family. It’s a reality that I don’t want to become numb to. I fear that it’s become so prevalent that I will reach an anesthetized state. But I don’t think it’s possible to be completely still, to be completely numb. Like I said, I was just at the border this summer. I had to plead with border agents. I cried. I left behind someone I loved. It tore me apart and I can never forgive this country for what it has done to my family even if I do eventually become a citizen.

  SE: As a bit of a follow up, how do you see fear showing up in your poetry (topically, formally, tonally, etc)?

  MHC: I haven’t written much new poetry after finishing my manuscript. I’m working on a book of essays now in which I talk about fear and how it shows up differently in different people and situations. I wish I wasn’t afraid, I wish this wasn’t my reality. What do I gain by recreating that fear in my poetry? I guess the takeaway from my BuzzFeed essay was that poetry saved me. Now I’m not too sure. I’m not sure how much poetry can do for me. Even if I had written poems worthy of a Nobel Prize, I wouldn’t have been able to continue my graduate program if I didn’t have a valid social security number. Yes, poetry helped[s] me but it can’t save me. If I’m ever deported, I’ll still write poetry, that I’m sure will never change. I don’t want it to seem like I need validation and recognition from a government to consider myself a person, but in order to function I need what the government denies millions of people. I need mobility, I need proper identification, and I need a number that says my real name.

• Collagist - http://thecollagist.com/collagist-blog/2017/2/25/syphilitic-with-vision-an-interview-with-marcelo-hernandez-c.html

  Feb 25, 2017

  Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and crossed the border through Tijuana at the age of five with his family. He is a Canto Mundo fellow and the first undocumented student to graduate from the University of Michigan’s MFA program. He teaches summers as the resident artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida and at Sacramento State University. He was a finalist for the New England Review Emerging Writer Award, and his manuscript was a finalist for the Alice James Book Prize and the National Poetry Series. His work has been adapted into opera through collaboration with the composer Reinaldo Moya. His poems and essays can be found in Indiana Review, New England Review, The Paris American, Gulf Coast and Southern Humanities Review, among others. He helped initiate the Undocupoets campaign which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country.

  His poems, "La Virgin" and "Orgin of Prayer," appeared in Issue Sixty-Two of The Collagist.

  Here, he speaks with Interview T.m. Lawson about the poetical influence of Larry Levis, styling decisions within verse, and the path to creation.

  You once said in an interview (with PBS) that you pursued writing as a way to offset suspicions on your background as an immigrant and, “[b]y way of fear, along came poetry.” I thought this was insightful; powerful poetry comes from powerful emotions that spark it. You start your poem, “Origin of Prayer”, starts off with this emotion: “In all its simplicity to pray / is to stare at something other than yourself for once.” It is dedicated to/styled after Larry Levis (who is a personal influence of mine as well!) Which work of his inspired this poem? What is your process when ‘transmigrating’ the soul of another poet’s poetry into your own writing?

  First of all, thank you for these questions and thank you for your time. I absolutely love The Collagist. It was one of the first journals that I published me in which I thought “I can actually do this.” I feel like it’s been such a long time since I wrote these poems that it’s a joy to revisit them. I’ve changed them so much that I can hardly tell where one ends and another begins.

  I guess I couldn’t pinpoint exactly one poem of Levis that this was after but rather it was in the spirit of Levis’ work at large. He has these amazing and grandiose openings that assume complete authority, complete freedom to begin with something large and work its way into something small. He often opened his poems with these huge announcements that I was told needed to be earned—broad statements that couldn’t just be given away like candy, you had to work for them. From his early work, one of his poems opened with “The men who killed poetry / Hated silence…Now they have plenty.” Or, “The last thing my father did for me / Was map a way: he died, & so / Made death possible.” Like, how does he do that? And from one of my favorite poems of his, “The brow of a horse in that moment when / the horse is drinking water so deeply from a trough / it seems to inhale the water, is holy.” I think I am less of a poet every time I read Levis. I have family who’ve lived in Selma CA, his hometown, since the early 70’s. I visit Selma about once a year and every time I’m there I try to look for what he saw in those endless rows of grape vines. And then, I remember probably one of his best openings, “I’m going to put Johnny Dominguez right here / In front of you on this page so that / You won’t mistake him for something else, / An idea, for example, of how oppressed / He was rising with is pan of Thompson Seedless / Grapes from a row of vines…” I’m dumbstruck. If there was something to bow to I would bow in the middle of the hot Selma Sun.

  “La Virgen” is captivating, claustrophobic, and creepy. One thing I admired in the poem was the image of the Virgin Mary as a horrific figure straight out of The Ring, but the pious intensity remains true at the end despite some disturbing vibes. It is a delicate balancing act that you do, and do very well. This is a very specific question, but something that stuck with me; why capitalize the word ‘but’ in second to last stanza in “La Virgen”? Every other word, save for the pronoun “I”, is lowercased; is this a way of separating a major shift? I’m always interested in authorial intent for these little mysteries that present themselves in poems.

  I wish I had something interesting to say to this and I really appreciate the careful reading you’ve taken to it. I like that actually—a shift. There was a time when I was confused by punctuation or rather than confused, I was obstructed by it. I had a few unpunctuated poems and part of that process also meant leaving everything lowercase. I should have left even the “I” lowercase but I felt that was almost irreverence to Lucille Clifton’s use of the lowercase “i.” If I did it, I felt like it would come off as a cheap cop out. I liked how everything just stood there on the page, independent of itself. I guess it gave each line a greater autonomy than I could manage at the time. Unfortunately, I wasn’t so good at it as I first thought. I just couldn’t maintain it. There were places I absolutely needed punctuation. So, that strategy fell flat. I mean, it’s trial and error right?

  So, I guess to answer your question, that capital “B” was a typo. Like I said, I wish I had something better to say but sometimes it’s less glamorous than that. I love that you allude to The Ring. La Virgen de Guadalupe has always been an idea that evaded me. I didn’t grow up catholic but I always felt like she transcended religion and embodied more of a culture iconography. I left the protestant church because I was disillusioned by conservative ideologies that were narrow minded and even at times hateful. I spent a lot of time thinking about the allure that La Virgen had on me. A few years ago I went to Mexico City to see the original painting and climb the hill of Tepeyac where she first appeared to Juan Diego. Do you know what they do with all of the flowers that are brought to La Virgen at her altar? A convent crushes them and infuses their perfumes into special rosaries. Isn’t that beautiful?

  Religion seems to be a running theme in both these poems, yet it does not always have a positive spin. For instance, “Origin of Prayer” features a line that starts with a saint “syphilitic with vision”, which immediately brings to mind the various infamous Catholic church scandals and it is followed up by a later more reflective line: “Perhaps God too had to look away from Himself”. This brings to mind the current state of participation in religion and its decline of prestige. It strikes me as at once critical but also as a loving homage to the history of the church and what it (can) inspires. Does this theme and perspective repeat for you?

  It’s funny that you point to that line because now that I’m on the the theme of Levis, I actually think that line came from Levis. Something about “syphilitic with vision.” I think it comes from his poem “Linnets,” which is one of my favorites. I might have jumped the gun with my last response but I really did become disillusioned with religion. I couldn’t get over the hypocrisy. And yet, I still pray, if ever briefly. I still write about God because it’s such a great invention, or idea, isn’t it? Not to say that God doesn’t exist, but that our image of him/her/them continually changes.

  What are you currently reading?

  Right now I’m reading a lot of prose. I’m reading Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, and I’m trying to get through Cynthia Ozick’s Quarrel and Quandary, though I find it highly problematic. I just finished The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison and, coincidentally, I’m reading a theological text titled Defense of the Faith and the Saints, by some guy named B.H. Roberts. I’ve never read Virginia Woolf so I’m getting through To the Lighthouse. There isn’t much in terms of poetry but I did just start reading Jennifer S. Cheng’s book House A out from Omnidawn. I promised myself that I would read more. Last year was probably the single most difficult year of my life for reasons I won’t go into here but I finally feel like I’m getting back into a rhythm.

  What are you writing or working on?

  Right now I’m working on a book of hybrid essays / memoir (thus all the prose I’ve been reading). I want to investigate the mechanisms behind the immigration apparatus and the effects that the immigration system has on families. Both of my parents have been held in immigration detention centers and I want to elucidate the impact of incarceration.

  I want to investigate the ideas of separation, Latino Masculinity, exile, deportation, immigrant experience, death, and sexuality. I envision this as a collection of interconnected essays, perhaps even lyrical in some aspects. It’s still in the early stages but I hope to get some momentum going this semester with a light teaching load.

  I haven’t been writing much, or actually any, poetry lately. I feel like I can’t move on until my book of poems is out in the world. I feel like the more I tamper with it, the more manipulative the meanings become. I don’t want to write toward something but rather, I want to be lead by something.

  I want to stretch these poems to their breaking point. Sometimes I think I do more harm than good by continually revising. Sometimes I think that previous versions were far better off without my tampering. I’m at the point where I’ll either work on these poems further for a few more years or throw them away and start over again.

  I’m also going to begin a translation collaboration with another poet. We’re translating a 600 page book of poems written by a young experimental Latin American poet named Yaxkin Melchy. I’ve published a few of his translations on my own but it’s going to be great to see what we can translate together.

  After a completely hellish year, I just want to create something again. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

• Paris Review Online - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/05/daca-poet-speaks/

  QUOTED: "My readers have such a difficult time placing them in time and space. There’s no body attached to them. No attachment to the real world. This literally comes from this anxiety I had that I didn’t want to say too much."

  A DACA Poet Speaks Out
  By Tara Wanda Merrigan February 5, 2018 ARTS & CULTURE

  MARCELLO HERNANDEZ CASTILLO

  On any given day, the county jail in Marysville, California, holds about 170 immigrant detainees awaiting hearings. Because Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not have an office nearby, the inmates will be shown via Televideo to one of the three judges of San Francisco’s immigration court. After their hearings, 90 percent of those inmates will be put on a green bus and taken to an ICE detention center for deportation. The Marysville jail is just one of the nearly two hundred jails where ICE held contracts last year. It also happens to be just a few blocks away from the home of Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, a DACA recipient and poet who recently moved back to Marysville to be near his mother.

  Castillo’s debut poetry collection, Cenzontle, will be published in April. It has been nearly four years since Castillo became a legal resident, after marrying his longtime girlfriend. But when the Department of Homeland Security bus rolls up to the jail on Friday mornings, Castillo feels a familiar paranoia. “Some people think the border just exists along the southern part of the United States, but it’s like a panopticon,” Castillo says. “Their omnipresence—that ICE can be anywhere—is what most attacks the psyche of undocumented people.”

  Castillo’s family came to the United States when he was five years old. For twenty years, the poet lived in a state of hyperawareness, as if he were a prisoner in Bentham’s circular jail, trying to avoid the all-seeing enforcement agency at its center. “Your self is first and foremost dictated by your undocumented status,” Castillo tells me. “Nobody knows that you have to filter your experiences with: Can I do this or not?”

  Castillo was excluded from the mundane privileges that documented Americans take for granted. When the local public library began requiring Social Security numbers, Castillo could no longer borrow books. When driving, Castillo strictly adhered to speeding laws. He would drive his brown Ford Taurus sedan, chosen for its discreteness, at exactly sixty-seven miles per hour when the highway speed limit was sixty-five, because “sixty-four would’ve drawn too much attention to myself,” he says. (More than once, he tells me, he almost got into a car accident because he was looking at the speedometer rather than the road.) While studying for his M.F.A. in poetry at the University of Michigan, he could not work as a teaching fellow or grading position to earn his scholarship, as most M.F.A. candidates do, because he didn’t have work authorization.

  Constant hypervigilance made it difficult for Castillo to develop a stable sense of identity—so much so that for many years the poet avoided writing from a first-person perspective. “My poetry doesn’t exist anywhere,” Castillo says of the poems in Cenzontle, which won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize in 2017. “My readers have such a difficult time placing them in time and space. There’s no body attached to them. No attachment to the real world. This literally comes from this anxiety I had that I didn’t want to say too much.”

  In 2012, President Obama announced his DACA executive action. That fall, Castillo began studying at Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus and was therefore eligible for the temporary relief. It was there in Ann Arbor, far away from the California county he had grown up in, that Castillo decided to come out as undocumented. The admission was hard for him; he had kept his undocumented status secret for so many years. He had not even dared to discuss it with his extended family. “The words had never taken shape in my mouth,” Castillo says of that moment. “It felt like I was looking at myself while saying it.”

  Receiving DACA provided Castillo relief. The benefits were evident: the poet received his first government-issued ID, he could work for the university as a teaching assistant, and he was able to openly discuss his life with peers. It also emboldened Castillo and others to launch the advocacy group Undocupoets, which, in 2015, led prominent poetry contests, like those run by the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation, to remove American citizenship as an entrance requirement. This work has enabled the forthcoming publication of his own first collection by BOA Editions. (Northwestern University Press will also publish a selection of the poems in Cenzontle in April, in a chapbook called Dulce.)

  And yet, twenty years of undocumented life still haunts Castillo, especially in his poetry. Many of the poems in Cenzontle were completed after Castillo received DACA status and later a green card, and yet they manifest the confusion and dislocation he experienced while living undocumented. “A very foundational part of me was in that mode,” Castillo says. “And that’s the poet I became. It wasn’t on purpose, but when I realized it and tried to change, it was too late.”

  Castillo crafts evocative scenes that draw readers in, but then, after a section break or sometimes even a line break, the focus changes. Readers are thrown into a new scene, equally compelling but seemingly unrelated. This juxtaposition prevents Castillo’s work from offering the comfort of logic or predictability. Instead, they twist away from you:

  After the first boy called me a wetback,
  I opened his mouth and fed him a spoonful of honey.

  I like the way you say “honey,” he said.

  I made him a necklace out of the bees that have died in my yard.

  How good it must have felt before the small village
  echoed its grief in his throat, before the sirens began ringing.

  Several of his poems evince a frustrated desire to be able to tell a life story and be understood. Describing the men of his family who share his given name, Castillo writes: “And all of us in one suitcase that hasn’t been opened. / I haven’t been opened.” Other, more abstract poems show the distance between the language of documented Americans and that of undocumented ones. In a poem titled “Immigration Interview with Jay Leno,” a stern interviewer asks immigration questions such as “how long do you plan on staying here?” To this, the immigrant responds, “We would have drowned / even without our laughter.” The effect is jarring:

  Is that really your name?
  Yes, the clothes on the floor
  blossomed like the orchards in spring.

  Have you been here before?
  There was a man who knew the way.
  I put his fingers in my mouth
  when he pointed in the direction of the sun.

  In his personal life, Castillo is still attempting to negotiate the chasms of communication that his poetry explores. He is currently at work on a memoir for HarperCollins, but he has found writing his life story in a narrative fashion difficult. Even though he no longer faces legal ramifications, it seems as if the necessary avoidance of his truth most of his life has made him fearful of telling it to this day.

  In the collection, which takes its title from the Spanish word for birdsong, to sing of one’s undocumented life is to risk being consumed by it: “The song becoming / the bird becoming / the song,” the poet writes. “The bird unraveled its song and became undone.” And yet, in the collection’s first poem, the desire to tell the story is also inescapable:

  Call it wound—
  call it beginning—

  The bird’s beak twisted
  into a small circle of awe.

  You called it cutting apart,
  I called it song.

  DACA and permanent residency have given Castillo the ability to speak openly, but he still has bouts of depression and anxiety and has sought mental-health treatment to help him adjust to his new residency status. Last year, when he could not afford therapy, he began jogging through Marysville to ease his anxiety.

  One early Friday morning, while out on a run, he came to an intersection and checked his surroundings. There, midblock, he saw a white bus with darkened windows parked near an entrance to the Yuba County Jail. Curious, he jogged by the bus to check it out. He saw a navy blue Department of Homeland Security logo. The old anxiety flooded back. He considered if he should wait around, try to speak to an immigrant being taken onto the bus, so that he could tell his or her family what had happened. But he also did not want to be a voyeur—to, as he told me, “partake in the spectacle of bodies being hauled away.” He ran a lap around the block, and another, and on his final lap the bus was gone. He did not see anyone being led from the jail to the bus, but he knew what had happened. He felt like the intense worry that characterized his undocumented life was justified. In that moment, it felt like ICE really was everywhere. He has not gone for a run early on a Friday morning since.

  Tara Wanda Merrigan is a freelance writer living in New York.

• Best American Poetry website - http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2015/10/latinao-poets-on-liminal-spaces-a-conversation-with-marcelo-hernández-castillo-by-natalie-scenters-z.html

  QUOTED: "that poem is the last poem in my manuscript, and it brings together a lot of this in between-ness that I’ve been dealing with all of my life. And so, in reading “Betwixt and Between” by Victor Turner I thought of a moment when I first was introduced to the idea of the endemic principle of not being able to name a thing. Though it’s played out in a lot of poems, I like the idea that this existence is unclassifiable from the point of view of a person who is bi-sexual, but who is also married."
  "I’m trying to define for myself a specific kind of Queer identity that isn’t defined as easily as other identities that are Othered by the White supremacist, homophobic society at large. So this not being able to name yet, is what I was working towards in that poem. I don’t know what the speaker, myself, and Ruby have. I don’t have a language for it yet."

  October 25, 2015

  Latina/o Poets on Liminal Spaces: A Conversation with Marcelo Hernández Castillo [by Natalie Scenters-Zapico]

  Marcelo Hernández Castillo's poetry is a lyric exploration into realms that are filled with missing items from unopened trunks, birds circling, and knives that never leave the hand. Marcelo's work is one that leaves me muttering to myself in awe at the painful dance he choreographs across the page. During conversations with Marcelo at CantoMundo in Austin, Texas this summer I found him careful and deliberate when speaking, while sensitive in listening to the voices of others in the room. To have a conversation with Marcelo is to think about the world in new and more delicate ways.

  We had this conversation over Google hangout after a long day of work for both us. We each expressed excitement at being able to have this conversation on liminal spaces and Latina/o poetry, and document it. This conversation is part of a series called "Latina/o Poets on Liminal Spaces," you can read my introduction here, a conversation with Javier Zamora here, and a conversation with Erika L. Sánchez here. This has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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  Natalie Scenters-Zapico: Where do you like to spend more time as a writer, in the metaphorical or literal landscape?

  Marcelo Hernández Castillo: Metaphorical. I was thinking a lot about this in Latina/o poetics and how much of it searches to be grounded in the liminal space. The liminal space being a space of transition, as being set aside, or this feeling of being exiled which leads to a state of permanent liminality. But for me it is very difficult to write about something directly. It’s difficult for me to make real allusions to cities, to dates, to people. For me, I’m happiest inside of the lyric. I’m happy inside of that which is non-referential. I like to say something without directly saying it because I find it very difficult to write about the border, or my family’s status, or my evolving status because I’m living it. It’s not something that I have to Wikipedia for facts, or something that I have to see on the news. I mean I see it on the news all the time, but it’s something that’s affecting my family even right now and will continue to keep affecting them. Even if I were to become a citizen eventually, and even if my mom were to become a citizen eventually, my brother, my sister, etc. there will always be somebody else keeping us in that state of liminality. So for me being in the metaphorical, in the figurative, in the lyric, in the ethereal makes sense because I can’t bring myself to write very directly.

  To be perfectly honest, it’s really because ever since I was little it’s always been very dangerous for me to write about that. And so, even though now I want to write about when we crossed the border, and my dad being deported twelve years ago, I still have this lingering fear that I shouldn’t write about it. And now I’m in the process after years of being in that state, of facing that fear and pushing myself into that space.

  NSZ: And there’s something in that fear of not wanting to be defined by it, but knowing that it is a deep part of you. Perhaps the dilemma is also knowing when something is a part of you and not wanting others to define it for you. In your poem, “Cenzóntle” you write, “Years from now/ there will be a name/ for what you and I are doing” and then later in that same poem you write, “ the bird’s beak twisted/ into a small circle of awe// you called it cutting apart// I called it song.” Is there trauma in existing in a space without a name?

  MHC: So here’s the thing, that poem is the last poem in my manuscript, and it brings together a lot of this in between-ness that I’ve been dealing with all of my life. And so, in reading “Betwixt and Between” by Victor Turner I thought of a moment when I first was introduced to the idea of the endemic principle of not being able to name a thing. Though it’s played out in a lot of poems, I like the idea that this existence is unclassifiable from the point of view of a person who is bi-sexual, but who is also married. I’m trying to define for myself a specific kind of Queer identity that isn’t defined as easily as other identities that are Othered by the White supremacist, homophobic society at large. So this not being able to name yet, is what I was working towards in that poem. I don’t know what the speaker, myself, and Ruby have. I don’t have a language for it yet. That’s why in the poem I say, “Years from now there will be a name for what you and I are doing” because I don’t have that language yet.

  And in that there’s the idea of invisibility, which as you and Turner have pointed out, being in that state is to be invisible. Which is certainly true in terms of documentation. You’re invisible not only by choice, but also you’re made to be invisible. There is a trauma in being in that state because no matter what you’re always invisible. I just read the essay, “On Finally Being Seen As A Black Woman Writer” by Rachel Eliza Griffith where she says to be seen means that I can’t be unseen anymore. For her, as a black woman, she felt like if you see me once then I can’t just disappear. And, for me, I have to constantly make myself be seen or else there’s a constant disappearance that happens for undocumented communities, and for people negotiating between two very distinct identities. There is a lot of trauma in that. Like I said I want to write about this stuff now, but everything that I had to repress, and everything that I had to act out in order to not be discovered as a kid is now catching up to me. Now I feel like I can’t write about it as much as I try. And that goes into every aspect of life, that trauma manifests itself in your identity: the way you behave in stores, the way you behave in a professional setting with teachers, etc. It becomes this thing that you wonder if you can ever really escape. It just persists and persists.

  NSZ: You’re very interested in your poems in what it is to be born, to give birth, and to carry. You write, “While swimming, another doctor/ unscrews another child from you/ and gives it to me.// He is gentle./ He is better than a knife./ Your one good dress/ in my one good hand/ in the only light.// We close our eyes/ and look at each other.” Is the violence of being born a rite of passage into a liminal space?

  MHC: Beyond that, not only do you have to be born but you have to be removed, you have to be pulled. For me, there’s this one big word that’s looming over a lot of this conversation and that is origin, and maybe also authenticity. It seems like within this idea of being in a liminal state, there’s also the assumption of coming from perhaps a more stable state, then moving into the liminal space, and then resurfacing as something else. But birth itself doesn’t take us to that space, instead it’s removal, or like you said exile, or being cast away from your origin. So I think a lot of what the Latina/o poets are doing is trying to ground themselves because there’s so much impermanence. Let’s say that you were born here, maybe you don’t have that kind of impermanence, but you do have family and friends who do have that kind of impermanence, and that pulls you in different directions. This idea of impermanence to me is what it’s like being in that state. And so, you want to think that everybody has an idea of origin for themselves, but what about the people who can’t visit their childhood home or country? For many that idea of origin always evades you. So for me, the birth itself isn’t a precursor for the liminal space, there has to be a pull or act of violence into what you and Turner are talking about in this idea of exile from your origin.

  NSZ: What about in the idea of giving birth to something?

  MHC: For me in giving birth to something, in that specific poem, plays a really important role. Not only because giving birth is seen as fulfilling a specific gender role, but reversing that giving birth puts the person who is delivering in that liminal space.

  NSZ: And in your work you seem very interested in this. The idea of giving birth, sometimes we don’t even know to what, but the act of giving birth as an exploration into how that process is to exist in that liminal space. And you access it in this way where, it’s liminal because it’s in conversation with what it means to give birth in archetype. It’s never this one speaker, in this one poem, rather you explore how it is ritual.

  MHC: Giving birth is definitely a ritual, one that brings you into something where what came before we can’t be sure of, but after that moment things will never be the same. In the current manuscript I often explore the idea of what it is to exist in this identity that I’m defining for myself. I also think about what it is to bring a human being into this world, given the kind of negotiations that I’m trying to figure out.

  NSZ: And if we think about the trauma of giving birth, and the trauma of what it is to move from one state to another, or to be told that you’re going to move, and never fully reaching it, that’s one of the interesting things that your poems accomplish. In your work there’s often that promise that something will be born out of this, but we’re left in that liminal space, we’re left mid-ritual.

  MHC: Yeah, I wrote this in my notes before talking to you: When am I going to get there? When am I going to be here?

  You’re constantly in this mode of, there’s gonna be something there, there’s gonna be something there, there’s gonna be something there. And then, when am I going to get there? And like I said, even if all of my family got their papers, even if my book got picked up, or whatever, it never feels like I’m actually there. So it becomes like teleology, this system becomes teleology, in that what I am now is less than what is supposedly waiting for me at the end of this transition. Supposedly something after this will help me move away from this rite, out of this transition, into something that is better than where I am now. And sometimes there is, I mean politically you have access to a lot of things. But what if this transition is better than getting to the end? Sometimes people don’t have a choice to stay in that liminal mode, most people wouldn’t want to. But to think of it as what I am now is less than what I will be if I reach that next step is problematic to me. I want to resist that idea that step one, is less than step two, is less than step three, and so on. These binaries that we always build our life around, these binaries of the border, of this and that, I’m trying to resist narratives of binary. Binaries have always told us: man-woman, A-B, all these bifurcated systems, but I want to question that. I want to define something else, that which resists binaries. But, of course, when am I going to get there? I’m always stuck in this transient mode, and it’s complicated. And I don’t think that the work of one person can help us complete that, but we have to begin trying.

  NSZ: In thinking about the way in which the trauma of immigrating, or bridging cultural boundaries, and other boundaries, and the way that that affects multiple generations, is immigrating exiling yourself to that liminality?

  MHC: Yeah, some of my friends who were born here are still dealing with the same kind of trauma. It is multi-generational. It’s not something that just goes away. I was thinking about this a while ago, with the idea of what does immigration do to the imagination, a panel I tried to put together for AWP, and how does the imagination change once you’ve been removed from a place you can call your birth home. I think that line, that distance, does jettison you into that liminality. And even on a level of race, I think about the way that second generation Irish or Italians have an easier time assimilating, or are allowed to assimilate, because they don’t come from the same history of colonization. So I want to expand that definition to include not only those who immigrate, but also those who immigration affects their lives.

  NSZ: So with the idea of liminoid phenomenon, do you feel like you have physical distance to play with liminal experiences? Do you create that space?

  MHC: There are similarities between liminoid phenomenon and the idea of duende. The idea of physically having to put yourself in another state of mind, in order to access a super-reality that is removed from logic. This is similar in surrealism, in surrealism you’re trying to access an un-reason, a logic that works on a different scale, a logic that works on different frequencies than we’re used to, and using that to expand our system of knowledge. There’s this great line, in the poem “A Dish of Peaches in Russia” by Wallace Stevens that goes, “With my whole body I taste these peaches,/ I touch them and smell them.” And I always go back to that when I’m thinking about creating these spaces, or entering these spaces, in order to produce something that expands what we know about a thing.

  So physically my writing habits change day, night, cafe, my room, but that can’t be possible without reading and communicating with other people. To cultivate that is to build community, especially with other writers of color, or other marginalized voices. You do have to step outside of the superstructure, in order to put two things together that wouldn’t normally be put together. And the distance between them, that’s the image, that’s the good part. Which is probably why I’m really content being in lyric-association, and finding different ways of putting two things together that normally would never be seen together. I like that the space that exists between them is the liminal space.

  NSZ: How do you reinvent the narrative of displacement? And how does displacement help to reinvent the insurrection of the superstructures?

  MHC: For me it’s always been about authenticity, about always having to prove my authenticity, whether that be on the page, with a social group, proving that I’m well versed in what people expect me to be, you know, well versed in the White Western canon. So the narrative of displacement gets inverted by allowing myself to be against this idea of authenticity, by allowing myself to speak about things that aren’t well grounded in a landscape, in a city, in a very particular situation. But nevertheless I am talking about exile, about immigration, about border politics. I want to allow myself to not rely on other people’s definitions of authenticity in my own work. I want to expand the words that are used to define our own language that destabilizes a very White, hetero-cis superstructure that has existed for a very long time. We can do that in multiple ways, not just in the ways that Amiri Baraka did it, or in politically inclined ways. We have to expand the ways that it can be done. And for me it goes back to that trauma, I can’t write a poem specifically about this state in this time. I’ve had to divert attention away from myself my whole life, try to blend in as much as possible, try not to call too much attention to myself. I think broadening the ways in which we can write against that narrative, against a narrative that’s been given to us, a narrative that is expected of us.

  I feel like many times, even in workshop, there’s a specific narrative of displacement that is expected of me and when I don’t fulfill that then that idea of authenticity goes into play. That idea of: He’s not being authentic enough. We have to broaden what we mean by narrative of displacement. I want people to know that just because I’m talking about theme a, b, or c, doesn’t mean that I’m not capable of it.

  NSZ: It’s interesting, you keep talking about these ideas of authenticity and complicating that idea. And the idea of expectation, being expected to write about a certain subject matter for a certain audience. I feel like that’s such a constant thing in Latina/o literature, you never feel totally authentic. It’s always interesting to me when I meet writers who I think would never have those kind of authenticity issues, and the more that you engage with either their work as they keep publishing, or as you get to know them on a more personal level those ideas continue. Especially in the U.S., the idea of: I’m more this than you are. So, what is authenticity in Latina/o literature? What does it mean to complicate it?

  MHC: Any idea of authenticity has to involve resisting a White narrative, resisting a hetero-normative patriarchy, a narrative that has historically been used against us. But, for me, authenticity doesn’t mean that this poet spent half of his life there, and half of his life here. Or, this poet has more ties to this or that, that has nothing to do with it because it’s all subjective and self-identifying. We have to remove the part of authenticity that is informed by institutions that says this person is more authentic than that person. I think the only reason we have angst of authenticity is because it’s been imposed on us. It doesn’t come from us, it’s been imposed on us, and it’s been internalized by us. So we’re dealing with all of these anxieties not out of our own creation, but because these are the questions we’re always getting from people who aren’t a part of that community. Were it to be just us, everything we write would be authentic. It’s only an issue because the idea of authenticity has been imposed by the dominant white men in the room. So that’s where we need to start, is in that recognition.

  But then again we all want jobs. I was talking to someone recently about this and they were saying that to be Latina/o poet, and to be successful means that you’ve been approved by a lot of white gatekeepers, that you fulfill those requirements, you’ve checked off the boxes. So I don’t know how I feel about that. You want to do good for yourself, but then you wonder am I only doing well because I fit into these roles that have been imposed on me? So, I don’t know. It’s complicated.

  NSZ: In your Buzzfeed article “Poetry as Passport” you write, “I’ve come to see that as soon as someone talks about Latina/o poetry they immediately make it Other poetry. They see my work as springing from the outside even before reading it. Binaries used to define an aesthetic, such as Latina/o or not, serve only to exclude creative possibilities and emerging voices. It’s wrong to think there only exists one form of Latina/o poetry. People expect me to claim allegiance to something I already belong to, something I already own. I am tired of having to explain myself, and having to show my academic credentials to other writers, and people in general, in order to justify my role in the conversation.” Are we in a system that continually pushes Latina/o poetry into a liminal space? How do words like regional, ethnic, or marginalized further serve to keep us in that space?

  MHC: Academic circles and institutions don’t reflect reality. They don’t reflect what is happening in the demographics of the rest of the country. If they did, English departments would look very different than they do right now. And because that is the case, because it doesn’t represent the reality of most major cities, and even many small towns in America, I feel like it’s always going to be seen as Other. But then, how do we fight White supremacy? How do we fight institutionalized forms of racism? And here I’m thinking of things that might prevent one person from getting hired, or another person from getting a book. It’s just the things that are making institutions right now the way they are, and as long as that’s the case then I feel like it might continue. We need more reviews, criticism, critical attention paid to writers of color. And I’m left thinking, because what do you do?

  NSZ: Yeah, I mean one of the things that really disturbs me is the idea that there maybe can only be one to two slots for Latina/o voices and then it’s done. Because you know that the White men, who are applying to those same contests, if they see another White man win they’re not thinking, “Well there goes my chance for the next few years.” And it’s a violence in which we are pitted against each other that creates for an ugly landscape, even if those thoughts only ever happen internally. It would be huge if we could just get to a place where two Latina/o writers would win a national prize a couple years in a row and it wouldn’t be seen as a big deal…

  MHC:…it wouldn’t be seen as a political…

  NSZ: Yeah. And that furthers our liminality, because then we’re in that space not only in our existence but also in the po-biz. What I will say, is that what we’ve been able to create as a Latina/o poetry landscape despite all of that is pretty amazing.

  MHC: I want to point out the idea of the default. The idea that when people read a book, in their heads the race of the people is White. So when you have two White writers win a national prize two years in a row, or ten years in a row, it’s never seen as odd because it falls into people’s idea of the default. And so, if the default starts being that writers of color are getting reviews, prizes, jobs that would be challenging for many White poets. But that default is something we have to question. When there’s three White, male poets winning the same prize every year we have to question that. To voice these issues is the beginning of that change.

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  Author pic

  Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and crossed the U.S/Mexico border through Tijuana at the age of five. He is a Canto Mundo fellow, and the first undocumented student to graduate from the University of Michigan’s MFA program. He teaches summers as the resident artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida. His poems and essays can be found in Huizache, Indiana Review, New England Review, The Paris American, and Southern Humanities Review among others. With Javier Zamora and Christopher Soto, he initiated the Undocupoets campaign which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country.

• Minnesota Review - https://minnesotareview.wordpress.com/2017/09/26/be-hungry-for-more-discussing-daca-with-poet-marcelo-hernandez-castillo/

  QUOTED: "It’s important that we are the ones who get to tell these stories for many reasons. First, it’s doubtful that they would be told in the first place if we don’t and, secondly, we need to show the complicated, multi-faceted/dimensional nature of immigration, documentation, borders, and migration. It’s not just one story. Not everyone is from Mexico, not everyone crossed the border through the desert. We need to complicate and expand the narrative so that people can see the nuance, and the multiple forms of both pain and beauty that arise from immigrating."

  “Be Hungry for More”: Discussing DACA with Poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
  SEPTEMBER 26, 2017 / THE MINNESOTA REVIEW CREATIVE WRITING STAFF
  On September 5, the Trump administration announced it is ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an immigration policy that enables immigrants who arrived here as children to be deferred from deportation and apply for a work permit. With Trump’s announcement, the future of about 800,000 young people has suddenly become much more uncertain. During these troubling times, the minnesota review is seeking to bring the voices of undocumented writers into the literary conversation. This week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, an award-winning poet, activist, and former DACA-recipient about his experience with the program and the intersection of art and activism.

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  There is so much misinformation and vitriol in our current political dialogue that it can be difficult to determine fact from fiction. What are some misconceptions (or lies) about DACA that you would like to correct?

  Thank you for making the space for these questions. This is a difficult question to answer because it is one which necessitates an assumption on my part as to who the audience here is. Those who never supported DACA will continue to believe and seek out these misconceptions. But I don’t want to talk about them. The misconceptions are a glaring marker of what people choose to believe. The rhetorical undercurrent of Jeff Sessions’ announcement on September 5 was to demonize, spread xenophobia to make sure DACA-mented individuals understand that they will not belong. The idea, this fiction of an American will always be out of reach. The most obvious misconceptions are the same ones that have been repeated for decades. And I’m shocked at how many of these are still, if even tangentially or obliquely, considered true.

  Some people believe that DACA is stealing jobs away from the “American people,” that there’s some magical line you can just get in or that somehow it’s a path to citizenship. The idea of this “line” is especially troubling because it presupposes that this is somehow a choice, which then trivializes and diminishes our struggle. Beneath these misconceptions, which were spewed by Jeff Sessions in his speech, is the idea that DACA is an infestation, a parasite, something inherently counter to American progress and American well being.

  But there are more subtle misconceptions that even liberal-minded allies tend to overlook in their (sometimes) self-righteous attempts at solidarity. Some of them include this idea that our worth is measured by our success. The endless praise about the DACA student who went to Harvard, or created their own tech startup, or is working for a Fortune 500 company makes the assertion that only then will people have sympathy, rather than for the simple fact that we are people. It erases many of those who chose other paths in life and sets a hierarchy of deserved-ness based on what kind of capital you contributed to society. This also repeats the pattern of stigmatization around manual labor. That somehow you are seen as less than if you work with your hands. I read this on Twitter from someone named @aguachiles who said ““I am more than the labor that I produce. I am more than just a surplus for the economy.” And I couldn’t get it out of my head. How true, I thought.

  You are the first undocumented student to earn an MFA from the University of Michigan. You’ve written about how DACA enabled you to do this because it allowed you to get a work permit. Could you elaborate on the ways DACA changed your life, and how rescinding it will therefore affect you?

  I received DACA in the spring of 2013 during my second semester at Michigan. The work permit allowed me to continue into my second year as a graduate student instructor. Without it, I would have had to defer my position until I could come back with a valid social. I was also granted advanced parole which allowed me to return to Mexico for the first time since we immigrated in 1993. Because I married a naturalized citizen, my wife Rubi, I was able to apply for permanent residency status and finally received my green card in the summer of 2014. So, having my “papers” means that I’m now documented. It’s strange because everything happened so fast and now it’s been taken away as soon as it came. I am aware of the tremendous privilege that was granted me from one day to the next and I plan to use that privilege to fight in ways that I couldn’t before due to fear.

  the minnesota review is edited by Virginia Tech students in the MFA in creative writing program. In what ways do MFA programs (and higher ed in general) systematically privilege people with U.S. citizenship? Do you have any proposed reforms for these programs so they can become accessible to a more diverse range of students?

  To be a citizen of the country in which you live (and for many, were raised in) is an incredible privilege. I can’t get into all of the ways that privilege works in regards to citizenship, migration, etc., here, but I will say that not having to think about this shows a complacency in academia rarely talked about. Many programs don’t have procedures in place, actual written protocol and systems of reference or resources for prospective and current students. They don’t have to worry about those students because they don’t know or believe they are there. But our Undocupoets campaign and now our fellowship proves that indeed they are. I think about how many students felt discouraged from applying simply because there wasn’t something as easy as a FAQ section on the program’s website for undocumented folks. I’m not saying programs need an entire overhaul (well, that’s for another discussion actually) but something as simple as stating in their mission statement at the top of their website that they support the rights of prospective students with or without DACA (because some students still don’t have or don’t qualify for DACA). That’s it! That’s all I would have needed to hear to reassure me that I would be in good hands when I was applying. They don’t understand how much those words mean to someone like 23-year-old me looking obsessively through all of the programs’ websites for even just a hint that they would be supportive, any small clue.

  I know some programs have already done this. Notre Dame for example has a clear statement on their website. Whether other programs follow through with their support is another matter, but at least it allows people who might be interested in applying and who are undocumented to know that they are welcome.

  What advice or insights do you have for students who are facing the threat of their DACA status being revoked?

  I would say to be hungry for more. It’s hard to be simultaneously the ones most affected by this policy and be at the front lines of the struggle. It’s hard. Sometimes I turn off social media for long periods of time. Sometimes I just want to be silent and not be the one who is most mad, or the loudest in my rage, or even (especially) the one having to educate folks. And I feel bad about this. It makes me feel like I’m not doing enough for my community, or worse, that deep down I don’t care. But I’m slowly starting to understand that it’s not like that. Other people pick up the mic when you are too tired to speak. All the burden of keeping this struggle alive doesn’t just fall on one person. And sometimes it feels like that, especially on social media. Sometimes I feel guilty if I’m not present, you know? So, I want to say that it’s just as important to nurture those moments of silence when we are gathering ourselves as much as those moments when we have a machete in our hands. I think solitude has a bad rap. Although I may be contradicting myself, I also say to be hungry. By this I mean to say that we should demand more. DACA was an incredible step forward but it shouldn’t be seen as the final solution. There’s a debate going on right now within the DACA-mented community about some individuals who protested Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer for using DACA as a pawn in order to increase military spending. Some people say, essentially, we shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds us, and others don’t want the success of DACA to come at the cost of militarization which creates much more harm than anything. So, again, I say, be hungry for more. It’s so little what we ask for: a work permit. I think we should be asking for much more.

  You are one of the founders of the Undocupoets campaign, which seeks to remove publication obstacles for undocumented poets and writers. Why do you think it is so important for undocumented artists to have their voices heard?

  It’s important that we are the ones who get to tell these stories for many reasons. First, it’s doubtful that they would be told in the first place if we don’t and, secondly, we need to show the complicated, multi-faceted/dimensional nature of immigration, documentation, borders, and migration. It’s not just one story. Not everyone is from Mexico, not everyone crossed the border through the desert.We need to complicate and expand the narrative so that people can see the

  nuance, and the multiple forms of both pain and beauty that arise from immigrating, from living your life in hiding, and our specific form of survival. Our stories are not just ones of struggle but also of love and beauty. And we want to show that. Without undocumented artists at the forefront of this narrative, I doubt it would be as robust as it has been in multiple mediums throughout the years. What Loma, Javier, and Janine Joseph did was simply tell people that—yes—we are here, we exist. It was shocking to see how little some institutions have had to think about this.

  What poets or poems do you turn to for solace during challenging or uncertain times?

  To be honest, I’m not quite sure that I first turn to poets or poems in times of great uncertainty or tribulation. But this, of course, is only when the waters are the roughest, when my only objective is to be sure to keep breathing. Other things must happen first. Part of me is interested in what necessitates me to go to poetry and what doesn’t. I trust my body more than anything. I have large windows in my study and I like to open them in the morning and lay down on the floor. I burn palo santo. I run in the evenings. I say certain words to my plants. I feel like I can’t just go to poetry when I’m exposed, when I’m naked. I feel like I need to recover first. And when I do, I’ve been reading C.D. Wright lately. Larry Levis is permanently scattered on my desk and Octavio Paz’s El Laberinto de la Soledad. I’m trying to read it without the English translations but it’s a very difficult book. Yiyun Li’s latest book Dear Friend, from My Life I write to You in Your Life is a devastating book.

  Do you have any advice for allies who want to see the passage of immigration reform that would protect DACA recipients?

  Allies who are citizens cannot be deported. There’s been so many times when I’ve wanted to do more but was afraid. Even now, with my green card in hand, it can easily be taken away so sometimes I hold back. I just read a print by the artist and advocate, Julio Salgado, which read, “No longer interested in convincing you of my humanity” and it rang a very large bell deep within me. I feel like this is what I’ve been doing for a very long time. Trying to convince other people of our humanity. So, to DACA allies, I say you should be the ones convincing other people of our humanity because for some reason the country and especially this administration doesn’t believe us.

  Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, and translator. He is the author of Cenzontle (BOA Editions 2018), DULCE (Northwestern University press 2017), and Children of the Land: a Hybrid Memoir (Harper Collins Publishers in 2020). A Canto Mundo graduate, his work appears in The New York Times, PBS Newshour, Fusion TV, New England Review, Gulf Coast, Buzzfeed, Indiana Review, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. You can visit his website here.

  Sarah Hansen is a first year poet at Virginia Tech and reader for the minnesota review.

QUOTED: "Castillo's lyrically rich and cinematic debut compresses the emotional resonances of lived experience into poetic narratives."

Print Marked Items
Cenzontle
Publishers Weekly.
265.12 (Mar. 19, 2018): p48+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Cenzontle
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. BOA, $16 trade
paper (108p) ISBN 978-1-942683-53-7
Castillo's lyrically rich and cinematic debut compresses the emotional resonances of lived experience into poetic narratives of devotion, eroticism,
family, labor, and migration. The poems make displays of fragility and power by turn, a duality drawn into relief by the precarious condition of
the undocumented immigrant. In "Immigration Interview with Don Francisco," the interviewee conjectures that "Perhaps the butterflies are mute
because/ no one would believe their terrible stories." But Castillo resists resignation to silence; his poems embody a belief in art's transformative
ability. Lush musicality renders agricultural labor, corporeal punishment, and romantic difficulties beautiful. Forged in Keatsian negative
capability, Castillo's poetics often involve finding the description that will lift the painful or unjust into music: "The bird's beak twisted/ into a
small circle of awe// You called it cutting apart/ I called it song." In certain moments that turn toward song becomes a survival tactic ("After the
first boy called me a wetback,/I opened his mouth and fed him a spoonful of honey") and in other moments a way of relating to what one loves.
Thus, Castillo's poems become objects of community and gratitude: "I leaned into you,/ all of you,/ as if in chorus." (Apr.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Cenzontle." Publishers Weekly, 19 Mar. 2018, p. 48+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531977315/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=156b280f. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531977315

"Cenzontle." Publishers Weekly, 19 Mar. 2018, p. 48+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531977315/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018.

• Shelf Awareness
  http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=3210#m39777
  Word count: 505

  QUOTED: "Cenzontle is a rewarding, immersive experience into the mind and heart of an American immigrant who isn't afraid to sing the songs he hears--discordant and off-key as they often seem."

  Book Review

  Review: Cenzontle

  Cenzontle by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo (BOA Editions, $16 trade paper, 112p., 9781942683537, April 10, 2018)

  To enter Marcelo Hernandez Castillo's first collection of poems is to cross that vague border between realism and surrealism where images and sounds pile up to create a world unto itself. A once undocumented immigrant, the son and grandson of undocumented Mexicans, Castillo wears his race and origin pinned to his chest. Married to a naturalized citizen, he finally received a green card in 2014. Cenzontle is a highly personal trip into the often conflicted and confused heart of a man forced to subsist in the shadows of citizenship, race and sexuality where, like the mockingbird of its title, his poems replicate the songs already ringing around him and are shaped by "the echo/ and its echo."

  Castillo's work takes many forms and touches many moments of memory and passion. "Musical in Which You and I Play All the Roles," for example, is broken by half pages of white space as if to shift scenes. Centered on erotic romance, the narrator plays his "roles," including lusting after the "shy boys in the dark" where he imagines "trying to peel off all their tattoos with my tongue." The erotic pulse continues to beat in "Sub-Erotica Papers," as the narrator reflects: "Neither of us knew/ what we wanted/ but would do anything/ to have it." It appears again in "Fifteen Elegies" with the observation: "Kissing was sometimes like that--/ when it had nothing to do with mouths."

  Eroticism, maternal love, paternal abuse, immigration, politics--they all find a place in Castillo's world. He speaks of farmworker deaths by exposure to pesticides and the bodies of those crossing to the other side afloat in the Rio Bravo. In "Sugar," a boy endures a father's whipping with a belt nicknamed Daisy: "And after it's over, we know we have both become men./ Him for the beating,/ and me for taking his beating." Stringing this diverse collection together is the striking surreal imagery throughout, like that in "Wetback," where a bullied young Mexican immigrant narrator admits: "I wanted to dance by myself in a dark room/ filled with the wingless bodies of bees."

  A translator, essayist, and co-founder of the activist Undocupoets group, Castillo references his poetry to that of modernists like Larry Levis, W.S. Merwin and Tomas Tranströmer in an afterword. Cenzontle is a rewarding, immersive experience into the mind and heart of an American immigrant who isn't afraid to sing the songs he hears--discordant and off-key as they often seem. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

  Shelf Talker: The first poetry collection of once undocumented immigrant Marcelo Hernandez Castillo embraces the imagery and sounds of a life snipped from its roots.

• Rhino
  https://rhinopoetry.org/reviews/cenzontle-by-marcelo-hernandez-castillo-reviewed-by-luisa-a-igloria
  Word count: 943

  QUOTED: "Like the cenzontle, which in the Nahuatl language means 'possessor of four hundred words,' the poems in this book also carry traces of and pay homage to other poets’ words—Li-Young Lee, Giambattista Vico, Larry Levis, W.S. Merwin, Tomas Transtromer, Cesar Vallejo, Cathy Park Hong, and Edward Said, among others. But Hernandez Castillo’s voice is all his own—original, musical, lovingly and laceratingly attentive."

  Cenzontle
  by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
  Reviewed by Luisa A. Igloria

  Cenzontle by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
  Winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Prize
  Boa Editions, 2018. 112 pp.
  Reviewed by Luisa A. Igloria
  Cenzontle: From Classical Nahuatl centzontleh, shortened form of centzontlahtōleh (“mockingbird”, literally “possessor of four hundred words”), from centzontli (“four hundred, a count of four hundred”) + tlahtōlli (“language, word, statement”) + -eh (“possessor of”).

  - Wikipedia

  Before I walked into the poems in Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Cenzontle, first I read the introduction by Brenda Shaughnessy in which she both warns and swoons: “Who talks over beautiful music? Who doesn’t yearn to be dissolved, breathless, in the deep, dark waters of true art?” And it’s true: entering it, I didn’t quite know how to explain the feelings of arriving in the middle of scenes of unutterable despair and violence, alternating with a kind of lyric possession. I am ushered into this book by Castillo’s language, and it is a current delivering the shock of rapturous recognition along with the simultaneous moment of its withdrawal.

  Poems in Cenzontle abound in paradoxes and images that pit one state of experience against another, reminding me of some of the best ways in which mystical poetry (think Rumi and Donne) present the human condition: that is, in terms of the primary desire to find union with another—with the beloved, or with God—from whom one has been painfully separated.

  Hernandez Castillo, whose family migrated to the United States when he was five, had received DACA status through which he was able to obtain permanent residency. This enabled him to accept an assistantship and complete his MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan. Along with poets Javier Zamora and Christopher Soto, Hernandez Castillo formed the organization Undocupoets, whose mission is “to promote the work of undocumented poets and raise consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community… [and to support] all poets, regardless of immigration status.”

  That sense of mystical longing for the separated other therefore is mostly defined through the gritty and often harrowing narratives and contexts of im/migration and un/documentation in this work.

  Take these lines from “Origin of Drowning or Crossing the Rio Bravo”—

  If they can kiss you,
  they can kill you.

  Let’s continue this drowning
  to remember what we look like.
  …
  Let’s keep waking underwater
  until one of us gets it right.

  and from “Esparto, California”—

  I don’t know English
  but there is so little
  that needs translated out here.
  …

  If only I could choose what hurt.

  In one poem, a father teaches his son that “love is violence, that violence is the way of men.” In another, an unnamed woman calls the cops, buys and loads a gun, “fixe[s] the man in [her] story.” In “Chronology of Undocumented Mothers,” a mother carries her child on her back in passage, and declares:

  She will dream.

  She will swing the hammer at anything that moves.

  She says try it motherfucker.

  Here are burned-down farms and ranches, their soil giving forth plums or a sifting of bones. Here is the author’s uncle, a migrant agricultural worker, who succumbed to cancer after years of exposure to pesticides. Here are honey on the branch, bees on a string, birds in the orchard. Like the cenzontle, northern mockingbird found in British Columbia, the continental United States, and in Mexico from Oaxaca to Veracruz, the voices in Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s book sing in different registers about every fulfillment, consistently undone:

  The bird is on the low branch
  trying to put itself back together.

  Like the cenzontle, which in the Nahuatl language means “possessor of four hundred words,” the poems in this book also carry traces of and pay homage to other poets’ words— Li-Young Lee, Giambattista Vico, Larry Levis, W.S. Merwin, Tomas Transtromer, Cesar Vallejo, Cathy Park Hong, and Edward Said, among others. But Hernandez Castillo’s voice is all his own—original, musical, lovingly and laceratingly attentive:

  The bird sings what it hears, is a historical record, and becomes its song.
  Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world's first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of the full length works The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (selected by Mark Doty for the 2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She teaches on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015. www.luisaigloria.com

• Harvard Review Online
  http://www.harvardreview.org/?q=features/book-review/cenzontle
  Word count: 1101

  QUOTED: "The collection ... expands across the page in lines and strophes of various lengths that initially appear as if in fragments. As the book progresses, however, the less these lines resemble fragments of erasure or censure, and the more they come more closely to resemble a network of rivers. Themes and images spring up, run underground, disappear, and then overflow elsewhere in the book."

  CENZONTLE
  by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
  reviewed by Leah Silvieus
  April 18, 2018
  One might imagine Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s debut poetry collection, Cenzontle, as a paradisiacal river valley with its lush tangle of flowers, birds, honey, fruit, and origin stories. Unlike the biblical Eden, however, this paradise is not a utopia within which an omnipotent deity draws forth life through the binary oppositions of male/female, light/darkness, and land/water. It is instead a liminal space of constant change, being continually made and unmade through both miracle and trauma: people drown and then change their minds. A man dying of cancer from exposure to agricultural pesticides becomes a flock of birds. A child becomes a pile of glass, then a bell.

  The collection, selected by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, expands across the page in lines and strophes of various lengths that initially appear as if in fragments. As the book progresses, however, the less these lines resemble fragments of erasure or censure, and the more they come more closely to resemble a network of rivers. Themes and images spring up, run underground, disappear, and then overflow elsewhere in the book.

  Hernandez Castillo himself is familiar with liminal spaces: he was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and immigrated with his parents to the central valley of California when he was five years old. He was the first undocumented writer to graduate from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers Program, and along with Javier Zamora and Christopher Soto, he cofounded the Undocupoets campaign, which eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the US. His poems slip lyrically between Spanish and English, not so much crossing boundaries between languages as dissolving them:

  Still, I don’t know what country
  does death belong to.

  My skin is peeling.

  ¿Cual dios quisiera ser fuente?

  As Hernandez Castillo crosses borders and dips in and out of languages, mythologies and domestic scenes, the reader is reminded of the queer Chicana poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. D.A. Powell’s blurb points out that Hernandez Castillo also walks alongside Whitman, in their mutual containment of multitudes; tellingly, Cenzontle, the Spanish word for mockingbird, comes “from the Nahuatl word centzuntli, which refers to one who holds 400 voices or songs.” Hernandez Castillo echoes the Whitman who proclaims, in “Song of Myself,” “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable”—untranslatable not because of language barriers, but because the self resists fixity. To encounter the untranslatable in both Whitman’s and Hernandez Castillo’s work is to recognize the inherent fluidity of personal identity and of the US itself. Hernandez Castillo’s poems do not so much dismantle binary oppositions, but rather dissolve the boundaries between them:

  We can both be the bride,
  we can both empty our lover.

  Within Cenzontle, binary oppositions—of gender, socio-political difference, and even of human or non-human—are merely the banks between which the potential for the creative play flows, ultimately culminating in political resistance. This theme is particularly evident in Hernandez Castillo’s exploration of the fraught space between bodies. Proximity to an other brings with it the choice between violence and intimacy, and Hernandez Castillo’s speaker wrestles with both. In “Wetback,” a boy calls the speaker a wetback, and his subversive response to this othering is erotic, intimate: “I opened my mouth and fed him a spoonful of honey.” Later, he comments:

  Yes, I could have ripped open his throat.
  I could have blown him a kiss from the curtain.

  Cenzontle reveals a river-like flow of trauma between generations, and the ways in which we revisit our past in order to make sense of ourselves. The poem “Sugar” reverts from the repetitive language of litany into an simpler, almost children’s-book-like dialogue:

  Always the leather, always / my ass bleeding with welts—
  my ass purple with love,

  always / the belt he called Daisy.
  And I said hello Daisy, / and she said hello.

  Later in the book, “Daisy” reappears in “Miss Lonelyhearts” in a scene with a lover:

  Beat me the way our parents did.
  Put your belt in my mouth. Call it Daisy.
  I will eat it.
  I will make it come back to life.

  Even though the acts of remembering and naming often transfer trauma, they also provide pathways for connection. “We want to be angry at something / that we could name,” Hernandez Castillo writes.

  Many of the poems in Cenzontle appear in the form of a second-person address, often directed at the speaker’s lover or family member. The overall effect of the book, however, gives the feeling that these poems also address the reader. As Whitman does at the conclusion of “Song of Myself,” in “Fifteen Elegies," Hernandez Castillo waits for the reader, exhorting her to find a possible means of connection:

  Either praise the beautiful
  or praise what is left over.

  Choose the one that is most like a bridge.

  Soak your hands and face in it.

  The river-like configuration of Cenzontle recalls Heraclitus’s aphorism that one cannot enter the same river twice. The flowing water renders the river different in each moment, and yet, if the water were to stand still, the river would cease to be a river. Hernandez Castillo’s poems reflect a similar paradox. Once a man crosses a certain point in the Río Bravo as he travels from Mexico to the US, he becomes an undocumented immigrant, an other, even though he is physically the same person as before. Some Americans might argue that if we could just draw firmer boundaries or separate people into fixed categories of citizenship, we might make the US great again. But, as Hernandez Castillo’s Cenzontle shows, to be so reductive is to deny the great, constantly changing multitudes that exist among and within us all.

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