The High Caul Cap by Medbh McGuckian

reviews wiry white- and-brown wool and endless black eyes. Like Imperial Valley— the borderland where López’s poems originate—he saturates the pages with a sense of in-betweeness; however, the conversationaltoneandthefragmented verse are all a part of the rhythm of instability on the border. López invites readers to be split in two: the United States and Mexico. Some readers may feel inexperienced on this subject, but López’s poems invite the reader to experience such duality. For example, in “The Desert Series,” discontentment is felt everywhere and is partially a side effect of the heat in the Imperial Valley. These poems are not only about the heat that the Imperial Valley residents labor under in order to survive but also how the heat is felt on the other side of the border. In “Banter Is All We Needed,” the speaker and friends hear that the “Border Patrol found the bodies of a young man and woman lying down locked in an eternal embrace.” These moments in the poems are quiet ones; they induce prayers, grief for strangers, and sometimes shame that “everything we had already thanked our god for” is not enough. The struggle for survival that drives these poems comes from the treatment of Latino Americans and Latino immigrants. López’s poems reveal how US citizens distance themselves from Latin American issues yet prefer to consume their labor and goods. Spanning forty-five pages, the poems are undoubtedly López’s most profound artistic statement on the need for human-to-human relations among all the peoples on the continent of the Americas. In his last, wistful series, “1984,” López riffs Joe Brainard’s I Remember in an astounding style that covers difficult memories in clouds of childlike nostalgia. Balancing the work, the poems in this series impress a sense of hope in light of the contentious race relations between Americans and Latinos—a hope that comes from a child, an ex-junkie, and an immigrant whose safe passage is celebrated because of all those who were not met at the border with open arms. Marilyse Figueroa University of Oklahoma Medbh McGuckian. The High Caul Cap. Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2013. isbn 9781930630659 The poems in The High Caul Cap were written during the long illness of the poet’s mother, whose eventual death haunts the volume, and they present the relations of mothers and daughters with great complexity, not simple nostalgia or factual memorialization. The poet’s mother is imagined in the 88 worldliteraturetoday.org Bulbul Sharma Eating Women, Telling Tales Zubaan Ranging from humorous to touching to sometimes grisly, each of the nine vignettes presented in Eating Women, Telling Tales explore the complex reality of women’s everyday lives in India. When a group of women come together and exchange tales from their personal experiences, what emerges is a subtle commentary on the social hierarchy of village life and a glimpse into the intricate role of food in human relationships. Eduardo Sacheri Papers in the Wind Mara Faye Lethem, tr. Other Press Set within the culture of professional soccer, Papers in the Wind follows the story of three close companions taking on the responsibility of caring for the young daughter of their deceased friend. Despite the tragic loss and the odds against them, they rally with humor, love, and remarkable resourcefulness. Nota Bene hell of the Holocaust in one poem, while others locate her in a dreamscape that bears little resemblance to conventional hells or heavens. This is a hallmark of Medbh McGuckian’s style: she is at home in the fluid language of symbols, some archetypal, some drawn from Irish folklore, and some private. Although this death is the volume ’s focal point, the speaker wends her way through times past, present , and future. We can read this as an act of honor, though she refuses to see her mother in idyllic terms and does not flinch from the view of her suffering. The presence of death can have its own beauty, and the eponymous poem of The High Caul Cap offers us an image of a time in love with endings. Yet the poet

Art · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Shame · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law