PRISM international

Review by Brian Stephens

This frank collection of poetry by Angela Peñaredondo (she/they) manages the wondrous feat of being bracing yet elegant in its delivery: like a pour of chartreuse on a wintry day of reflection. nature felt but never apprehended investigates themes of intergenerational trauma, intimate and structural violence, the queer brown non-binary body, and how such an identity endures. I have always been drawn to Peñaredondo’s ability to explore these landscapes with a profound consideration for ambivalence. Her poetry brims with implacable curiosity about human contradiction and the “power of touch as both boundary and trespass.” Please be advised that my engagement with Peñaredondo’s themes of ambivalence includes a discussion of sexual violence.

There is a necessary clarity of feeling in many poems of this collection. Practicing self-compassion is non-negotiable for Peñaredondo as her poem [“induction in self-loyalty”] communicates. They bring a fresh and empowering perspective on an ancient poetic device known as the catalogue verse, a technique employed in epic poetry from the Bible to Homer. The catalogue verse typically contains an inventory of ideas, objects, or people. Peñaredondo subversively and meaningfully updates this device by providing a 10-point list offering glowingly abstract instruction to themselves or possibly others needing spiritual succor in the face of oppressive normativity. They write, “peel another layer of spectral radiance for every intimate question” as meta commentary on the formal aspect of the poem itself. Each line of the list sheds the weight of white heteropatriarchal discourse via her archipelagic imagery and drops it into the “arroyo,” a water way that is dry but fills up seasonally, thus creating space for a re-imagined self to “return in any order or fashion.” But they insist that part of this renewed commitment to loving our wounded selves is to “honor the return.”

Another form of return for Peñaredondo is to the theme of archipelago. Ocean inhabitants via the literary technique of zoomorphism animate complex human interiority for Penaredondo. The poem, “[becoming a minke whale]” is alive with sensuality as they navigate the waters of various iterations of resistance. They imagine a minke whale, a species that is the smallest in size but also known for being highly vocal, swimming in an ocean pregnant with human meanings. Peñaredondo is channeling the obstreperous whale to “create a viable future in shifty green among other whores and feminists…floating on her side, spectral algae tickling her brain and wanted curvy fat.” This might be understood as Peñaredondo’s voice of protest as non-binary and Filipinx against racialized and gendered dehumanization in a context that would have them think that the prizes of Man exceed the joy of those ancestral and reimagined archipelagos where one is always desired. Indeed, they recognize that “paradise lives elsewhere.”

In this elsewhere there is space to reflect on the gender and racial dimensions of intergenerational trauma in their poem [“cut an opening to mend the me.”] In this elsewhere silence is not an option. The poem engages with many themes from previous collections; but there is a boldness that separates [“cut an opening to mend the me”] from earlier work. In the poem Peñaredondo ruminates on the imbrication of colorism and femininity and asks, “what is the the that separates us from desiring ourselves?” As answer, she tells us, “my mother and her mother/ and her grandmother told their children, mostly/ daughters, not to stay out/ for fear of the sun” demonstrating how the burden of colorism falls disproportionately on women of color. What is the the? A blur of violence “lodged between fragments of memories and war stories my family kept hidden. Self-narration only goes so far.” And yet Peñaredondo digs up these fragments and presents them to narrate the unnarratable showing us that “if assimilation is erasure, then survival is innovative.” nature felt but never apprehended displays the elusive and ambivalent musing that defined their earlier writing but adds a more explicit engagement with the historic and contemporary conditions that make her excavation a survival aesthetic both miraculous and inspiring.

As I mentioned earlier there is a challenging and deeply compelling ambivalence that shows up in Peñaredondo’s work. Their poem “[meditations on a fist]” is illustrative. A fist can be an instrument of violence, and a vehicle for intimate and loving connection. The hands do not become fists until the fingers close and become a tool that probes, grasps, clench, pummel. None of these acts are inherently harmful; nor are they innately healing and productive. Peñaredondo explores the layers of conflicting meaning and never evades the ambiguity residing within a fist. They write,

“all five fingers can fit into womb or mouth/a man seated with hemp rope/ a strung-up rooster/eyes wide to the ivory.”

Peñaredondo may be commenting on the torture experienced by Filipino guerrilla soldiers as they resisted the dehumanising colonial rule of their western and east Asian oppressors. Indeed, the fists in “[meditations on a fist]” could belong to an American soldier entering the mouth of a “strung up rooster” to control, dominate, and extract secrets. There is a curious violence that shapes consensual sex acts, and these moments can be suffused with the expressions of control and surrender associated with scenes of military interrogation. A colonial scenario between captor and captive clearly differs from a sexual exchange between lovers, and yet provocatively overlap in mystifying ways. Peñaredondo writes, “The names and coordinates he confesses once a fist is removed” are revelations communicated in hiccups and screams; not so different in timbre than a lover’s yelps of assent when “the heat rises to ten.” Peñaredondo is at their finest when granting room for the ambiguity underneath outwardly decisive scenes of social engagement.

Finally, Peñaredondo is also an accomplished multi-media artist, and they weave elements of the visual into nature felt but never apprehended to underscore her thematic concerns. Peñaredondo collaborates with Claudia Torres-Ambriz on a photograph that bookends “[on cures & abrasions from a responsive environment].” The poem brings us into a vivid world of wild abundance upended by unnamed forces. Using powerful spacing between letters and words to express vastness they write,

“What was once wild chicken & pig farms once hectares of pineapple fields banana coffee cacao rice corn now inedible unlivable density”

But her poem offers us an opportunity to “remember what it’s like/to be of this deserving place.” An ability to recollect a plentiful past without sentimentalizing these memories is necessary for rebuilding after catastrophe. We are often left with the rough parts. Peñaredondo writes, “she wipes down the fevered/makes what’s bruised aromatic.” Indeed, deprived yet ingenious cooks (and survivors) know that it takes both time and the ability to improvise in the cruel present to soften the unknowable future. They write,

“Of those once-privileged limbs that mouth
that consumed everything it could because it believed it could
with even knowing the
i m m e n s i t y”

The letter spacing of ‘immensity’ speaks to the salvific wit that punctuates instances of darkness through nature. It is as if the letters of the word are a group of islands comprising an archipelago, and yet the rapacious “mouth that consumed everything it could” leaves something behind. What is it that the mouth cannot fit? The photograph that capstones “[on cures]” gives us an idea; it depicts a labourer’s outfit that lies on the ground. Peñaredondo is concerned with the devalued labour of the home as much as they reckon with the racialized and gendered exploited labour that imperialism depends upon. The people that psychiatrist and activist Frantz Fanon called “The Wretched of the Earth” often inhabit these clothes of the labourer. In the photograph, the suit is full with an imperceptible presence. That we can witness presence while simultaneously feeling an absence is a brilliant visualisation of how “[on cures]” engages with the poem’s closing idea. Peñaredondo and Torres-Ambriz visually delineate what defiantly remains from the immensity. The topography of an island frames the prone absent/present labourer suit to intimate the connection of shared places of emotional and geographical origin. Indeed, in the archipelago something meaningful survives the typhoons, military occupations, sexual violence, transphobia, U.S. sponsored dictatorships, gaslighting romantic partners, and abusive families. Nature felt but never apprehended shows us the i m m e n s i t y of what survives.

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Brian Stephens (he/him) is Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Media Studies at The Ohio University. His research on “Black Camp,” (a Black queer cultural practice that employs theatricality, humor, and incongruity to undermine received notions of identity), recovers Camp’s African-American contributors. His upcoming research examines the Black queer roots of Punk Rock music. His manuscript Prissy’s Quittin’ Time: The Black Camp Aesthetics of Kara Walker was published in Open Cultural Studies Journal.