Book Review

With just a few exceptions, Esteban Rodríguez uses one-word titles for the poems in The Lost Nostalgias: “Hitchhiker,” “Requiem,” “Shed,” “Cure.” It’s a move that reveals something about the speaker, who favors restraint and plainspokenness. But it’s also a way of being generous with the reader. Rodríguez sends us into each poem with a hint—a bit of advice on what to look for. Who is thumbing for a ride? Why do we need a song for the dead? Is “shed” a building or an action? Is the cure effective?

This isn’t to say that the poems explain themselves or lack nuance. Rodríguez’s work is layered and thoughtfully crafted. But I do sense that he cares about not obfuscating. He lets clarity exist where it can because the people in this book so often must go without it. The speaker and his Mexican American family live between and among cultures—a complexity that creates both uncertainty and rift. In “Bleached,” for example, the speaker recounts his mother seeing his newly lightened hair:

she didn’t curse me out,

didn’t say, in that disappointed Spanish

I never learned, that I had ruined

who I really was, unless I wanted

to look like a gringo, because—and this

I assumed she thought but never said—

my skin already looked like one

Familiar difficulties in communication—making assumptions, implying but not stating—are only exacerbated by a lack of shared language fluency. And that gulf, that barrier to understanding, also represents cultural divide. Later in the poem, the son acknowledges that he sometimes appears too pale to be the child of Mexican parents, too pale to have picked crops in a field, though regardless of appearance, he believes he’d still be viewed by others as an outsider, with some staring and some looking away. I had the sense that the parents might be among those deflecting their gaze—not out of embarrassment but bewilderment or sadness because their son, whom they love, is something of an outsider to them, too.

Questions of inclusion and belonging form the core of this collection. In “Abandon,” the father walks home after his truck breaks down and the speaker thinks of how he left Mexico on foot, hoping

. . . that days later,

sun-scorched and less of himself,

he would cross that mythic line,

find a place that would open its doors,

and welcome him home.

Those are the final lines of the poem, so we don’t learn whether the welcome comes. The poem does, however, seem to make a distinction between permitting admittance—the open door—and the enthusiasm of a true embracing. Inclusion, we’re shown, can be complicated and incomplete. We see this again in “Quinceañera.” Observing a celebration for a cousin, the speaker notes that this rite, also experienced by his mother and aunts, is one in which he’ll never participate “since all traditions // are one-sided.” Gender roles are also part of “Mechanics,” in which the father, unable to fix one of the family’s vehicles, stares into the engine compartment

as though he were at a funeral, and perhaps,

in his mind, some small part of him was,

a witness to the death of his manliness,

which results in the father eventually hauling the vehicle to someone who can work on it. The son watches as his father hands over the keys, confident “that in the right hands, the most broken things / can be repaired.”

Does this book believe, as the father does, in the possibility of complete restoration? I’m not sure, but it does offer occasional moments of ease. When the father punctures a foot on a stray nail, the mother rushes to coat it in lotion. After a decade of sixty-hour weeks working construction, the father moves the family to a three-bedroom home with a “finished driveway / and thick green lawn.” Cleaning out an old toolshed, the speaker realizes, “all things / are purposeless before they become purposeful.” That’s a comfort, isn’t it? A kind of easing? To know that you can make meaning for yourself gradually. To grow into your own resolvedness.

Those lines about purpose appear in “Shed,” which ends with the speaker laboring to make order in a forgotten outbuilding so that, in the future, “someone can stumble onto this, / know at least one person cared.” It’s one of my favorite poems in the collection and is in conversation with another favorite, “Bluebonnets.” Bluebonnet flowers, native to Texas and Mexico, are often seen alongside roadsides, but in this poem, the speaker finds a few scattered around trash cans at a rest stop and considers whether he should “orchestrate their exodus to a different / ground.” In the end, he leaves them where they are, these vibrant plants “like a truth too harsh to accept.” If in “Shed” he acts as a way to show he cares, does the speaker’s inaction in this poem demonstrate the opposite? No, I see it instead as wisdom. Rodríguez is teaching us that sometimes you can resolve disarray, create clarity and order, and that sometimes clarity eludes you. Sometimes you encounter disarray and can only observe—be a witness to what good exists in disorder’s midst.