Book Review

In Silvia Bonilla’s debut full-length collection, City of Eves, an intimate portrait of a community of Ecuadorian women emerges through a series of lyrical persona poems. We see these women across years of their lives, starting at school and camp: “It was charity from the gringos. / The beach camp where us girls met . . . .” The book follows as they navigate marriage, poverty, motherhood, and emigration—suffering and striving for meaning beyond survival in myriad ways.

The way Bonilla presents these stories and the voices who tell them is striking. Some poems are in singular first person, others in plural, and others in third and second person. There is a sense of chronological accumulation throughout, but it is more a sense than a progression. We do get names: Sonia, Irene, Matilde, and—of course—the Eves. And we know some basic facts about their lives: Sonia, the protagonist, becomes a single mother to her daughter when her husband is killed; Irene lends her school uniform to Sonia so she can attend Catholic school; Matilde marries young. The accumulation of who and when feels intentional because, as the poem “Guilt Game” about Sonia ends: “She spots herself / around in other places // living another life.” What also accumulates across these pages is a sense that things could be different, that the women’s lives don’t and even shouldn’t have to be this way, that all of us are moving through and within and from one another. The timelines of our lives are in actuality less distinct lines and more an intermingling of possibilities, Bonilla shows.

In that first beach camp encounter, the then-girls declare, “No need to translate us, / our skin testified to its nagging past: / mulata, chola, india.” Sonia, Matilde, and Irene represent the diverse ethnic identities of Ecuador: mixed race with African and European, then Indigenous and European ancestry, and lastly solely Indigenous ancestry. The names used for these identities—including that initial “gringos”—also carry derogatory connotations, nodding to the precarious and disempowered place these women hold in the culture in which they come of age.

Such embattled relationships with power are a throughline in this book. The Catholic Church, patriarchy, and poverty all wreak violence on the girls and women telling their stories here. Describing a photo of Sonia’s parents’ wedding, Sonia says, “She leans forward to sign her name as someone’s wife.” In church, the girls “hear stories from a book of pain, / as if we didn’t know.” As they enter adolescence, their interactions with men are mediated by a culture that sexualizes the subordination of women:

Where they came from, they were called the Eves.

Back in the bathroom, they run a baby wipe
over exposed arms, shoulders, and fierce cheeks.

They count their money.
No negotiations: twenty for a dance, twenty for a dance.

At the social, every other Friday, they jerk
to the nasal tones of their partners.

Their gaze, a clock on the wall.

The Eves’ gaze is depicted as a singular clock, counting as one.

In one of the collection’s most compelling sequences, Sonia tells of her harrowing journey emigrating to the United States with the help of a trafficker. First, she abandons her daughter, leaving her behind in Ecuador. In the poem “A Better Story,” she declares, “Like a prophet, a mother knows how to tell a story.” At the poem’s end she concludes, “Truth being a fragment— / Leaving you was—” A master storyteller, the mother knows when to hold silence as an essential, meaningful part of her story.

The reader gets a sense of just how dire the circumstances are as the sequence progresses:

We take shelter in dead cows and
lift ourselves with hooks to keep out of sight.
At checkpoints, our dangling bodies
hold legs to chest, as instructed, to avoid detention.
All language snuffed out
by the blue perch of meat. It’s a miraculous
thing to be wrapped in it.
After we pass, relief rustles
the epidermis—enough to warm us
for some time.
Who trained our bodies for this?
Poverty is violence.

Intermingled with its most challenging moments are two of the pleasures of reading City of Eves: its lively imagery and vivid musicality. There is an echo of a rhyme in “epidermis” and “to warm us” and, later, in “bodies for this” and “violence.” Bonilla deftly portrays the difficulties of the American immigrant experience in her embrace of exquisite detail throughout this collection’s persona poems, which each also serve as memorials. In “Meal Offering,” Sonia asks, “Please be kind to my story.” After a visit to City of Eves, readers will not only return home with kindness and empathy, but admiration for the tenacious human spirit that radiates from every page.