Book Review

Embedded in place and lush with family, Nathan Xavier Osorio’s collection Querida offers an intimate vision of Southern California that fortifies and fractures people who live on a desert’s edge. Querida is both a book of endearments and an excoriation of the forces that pry resources—human and natural—from a difficult landscape with no thought to replenishment. In image-laden lyrics, broken sequences, and even a handful of prose poems, Querida seeks to understand the ruptures to family and memory that exist within an immigrant experience, as well as the strength and abiding love.

Osorio’s first full-length collection is comprised of three sections, each existing within a universe bound by the Mojave Desert and San Gabriel Mountains on one side and the sprawl of Los Angeles on the other. While the first section casts a broad eye across its environs and the people who live there, the second becomes more intimate in its view, honed in on Osorio’s most personal relationships. Yet between the two, Osorio shares fragments of a sonnet crown, “The Last Town Before the Mojave,” a stylistic choice that seems to speak to the collection’s interest in displacement and broken terrains. Querida resides within an obviously American setting of twenty-four-hour superstores, fast-food restaurants, gas stations, concrete highways, and baseball fields, but these scenes are overlayed with the often unseen immigrants working toward their own version of an American dream.

Querida opens on the road in “English as a Second Language,” with the poet and his father heading south toward the border. In this America, the Pacific shoreline is peppered with nuclear reactors and “a network of oil lines spouting flames.” Failure, when considered through language and skin color, seems:

. . . most true here, surrendering

to nausea in the felt-lined Tijuana-bound camper

piloted by my dark-skinned father whom I’ve only ever understood in dialect

amalgamated from epazote and McDonald’s fries gathered

between the San Gabriel Mountains and Popocatépetl

In this America, the polluting exhaust of topless convertibles filled with streaming-haired blondes is invisible, while a round-the-clock security desk always spreads light onto “the alleyways of the bad neighborhood / and the hordes of day laborers spilling out into the avenues.” Yet Osorio ultimately finds blessings in remaining part of this frontier of police beats and tear-gas, night markets, and swallow nests, its nuclear reactors and oil rigs now gracing the rearview mirror, even if “the prospect of tomorrow’s new depths . . . baited as progress as self-preservation” is tempered and available only to those in seats of power.

Osorio is interested in the markings of power and the actions of those who wield it. However, the strength of Querida is in how the collection subverts traditional markings of that power by centering the losses and loves of his immigrant family, who, despite current political rhetoric, work hard to achieve their own measures of success. A tía stocks store shelves, while Papi sells hot dogs and soda near the registers in “Shelf Life” with “the tenacity of SPAM™ or the American spirit.” Strangers knock “at our door / asking for their money back or for a small loan of quarters” in “Earthquake Weather,” while Mami changes her work schedule to go to night school.

Querida is replete with people who undertake unglamorous, essential work: a cashier at the drive thru, cigarette girls at a casino, the tostilocos lady selling lunches outside a school gate. Or the immigrant mother, in the deftly crafted “Welcome to the Show,” who is responsible for marking a baseball diamond:

. . . Her labor, the machinery that moves us all

from the bottom to the top of the inning, monastic

like the oil red beads of a rosary and faithful like an

old friend or the upswell of patriotism in an emergency.

If Querida is a book of poverties and hungers, it is simultaneously a story of a family’s love, dreams, and memories, told through poems like “Mami, Tell Me That Story Again,” “What Do You Remember about the Earth?”, and “Desire Paths,” among others. Many of the first two sections’ poems address a “darling” or a “sweetheart”—the “dear” translated querida—even in poems with heavier themes, like “Overtime” or “Querida América.” Osorio leans into this tension between the strength of familial love and the indifference, if not hostility, of a country’s love, particularly for boys of color. Or, as Osorio asserts, “Querida América, I remember your promise / and put my lips to the gas tank.”

Osorio’s turn, in his third section, to these indifferent bureaucracies with another broken sequence, “Abandonarium,” expands his exploration of the exploitative nature of the American experience. In the scattered sections of “Abandonarium,” a councilman represents what digs into the earth to extract and corrupt it, and Osorio’s series of ritual poems attempts to fill the gaps of what has gone missing, as in the prose poem “Ritual for the Campesino”:

. . . In this well you’ll find: the sweetest fruit, tidepools of quiet, of

uncertainty, of music. I collect all these things. Gathering them in my

pockets till they overflow into the gutters.

As Querida nears its end in this mined well of Los Angeles, Osorio’s ritual poems break into Spanish for a line or two, as in “Ritual for Extraction,” or for much of the poem, as in “Ritual for Aisle 9.” This rupturing of language itself is an extraction, as Osorio has unearthed in the depths of his collection the roadway of his antecedents. For no matter how timely forms are submitted to the councilman, in “Ritual for the Circuit”:

the Martian lander still courses through outer space,

while the grave remains cold, mientras mi abuela y todas

sus abuelas todavía pierden el camino a casa,

el camino celestial vibrando con una canción desconocida.

Nathan Xavier Osorio traverses a diverse and complicated landscape in Querida, using vivid imagery that layers upon itself within individual poems and stretches across poems through their shared, and oftentimes rented, terrain. His exploration of family and homeland is intimate yet reflective of the immigrant stories so many Americans know in their own histories. On some level, our country dreams that displacements can be overcome with hard work, that struggles can be overcome with love. These ideas, like his antepasados, may seem like they are on life support, as Osario states in the prescient “Ritual for the Duende,” but perhaps our propensity for hope will also last as we look “forward to the day we’d escape the wound.”