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The Keepsake Storm (Camino del Sol)

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Strongly recommended reading from first page to last, The Keepsake Storm showcases the lyrical talents of academician and poet Gina Franco who draws upon an impressive tradition of storytelling in Latino literature to explore the transformative power of compassion. Dealing with such diverse themes as cultural alienation, lost family roots, the ambiguous nature of the self, Gina Franco uses her poetry to reaffirm the power of self-awareness, history, and places. Everything Goes Down a Changeling: A great cloud of tiny insects--ingenious,/the summer light sifted through all those wings/like that, like a thought shifting/over a bog veined in bright water./The air was coming down/with an imminent rain--I could feel it./And you were there, shaking your head,/smiling at the camera though I felt slighted./Everything goes down a changeling, you said./You've got to have it how you can./So it was hopeless already when I noticed/that my legs were running/with blood, with mosquitos thickly drowning,/when you turned from me saying,/well, it's what you wanted.

To say Gina Franco's "The Keepsake Storm" marks an "auspicious debut" flouts the work's wizened eye and immaculate intonation, as well as the balance it creates between self-invention and its reverence for the ancient. This may be a new voice, but its wisdom is ancient and its compassion bottomless in its mastery. There is nothing more boldly American than this poet's celebratory public-letting of sangre mestiza unleashed, harnessed and rivened through the lenses of Romantic and Victorian poetic sensibilities, Chicano cultural narrative and regional legend as it inundates-washes clean-transfuses, annihilates as much as it resuscitates, our notions of poetic form and ethnicity.

Although many articles are written each year on the subject of the "death of American Poetry," hundreds of books of poems by American authors go into print each year that test readers abilities to understand what is meant by "a sequence of poems," as if the words "sequence" and "poem" were some strange abstraction. Like a river, the trajectory of "The Keepsake Storm" however is crystalline from its beginning. It is a mistake to read "precious" into the sequence's seductively deceptive title: first separate "keep"-meaning: to honor; to store; to prevent; to maintain--from the Old English "sake"-meaning: a fault; a contention; an offence-and you only begin to touch on the enormity of Franco's ruminations on ethnicity, gender, abuse, longing, as well as a hopefulness coupled with a fear that hopelessness, real hopelessness, exists.

These poems tell as much of time and place as they undo conventional notions of each: in one poem, the poetic figure who has read, and understands the image created by Mary Shelley "Frankenstein," conflates-or folds-over, as if looking through a transparency-it's childhood notion of Frankenstein's castle as it rises up out of a mining town in Arizona. A flood clears a path and lays bare root and future in a poem called "Del Rio," yet is sustained by a premonitory voice-"The Spirit that Comes When You Call"-that, in its invocation of self, articulates core and derivation older than time, older than Western History, that encompasses Christianity, Indigenous traditionalism, and Colonial mythology as God, La Llarona, and an inextricable force align as one. "You want real?" "Fishing," the first sonnet of the sequence shouts, and then it dares you to look "real" in the eye, dares the reader to go where "God is mean and fresh." And through to the last, the collection holds up its end of the bargain by offering reflected and refracted images of human frailty at times in its most glorious pathos and at others in its most indecorous humor.

Read this book! Get a new enhanced education. It is like no other of the many wonderful and exciting collections published by the University of Arizona Press under its Camino Del Sol imprint. In many ways in differentiates itself from the others in that there are no robosos, tortillas, no borders erected as symbols of obstinacy in the face of oppression or change. If they are there, they are there: simply part of the landscape of a people and a place. Franco has pushed opened a new political and cultural arena for latina letters as her work seems to ask the questions, What do we do with the languages and images that we learn away from home; How are we to talk about ourselves once we've read the Shelleys? Onces we know more of the world than when we left, what do we do to tell those we now live with about where we have come from? This work brings fresh understanding to the notion of "mezclar," Without apology or sentiment, Franco has boldly and intelligently stated with grace and wisdom of formalist training, "I am Latina and this too is what it can sound like!"