Rattlesnake Allegory

by Joe Jimenez

Overview

These poems are about “the moment inside the body / when joy is not born as much as it is made out of anything / the rest of the world doesn’t want.”
Using land and South Texas’s flora and fauna as references, these poems explore aloneness and manhood as articulations of want, asking the reader to “take a moan by the hand, see what good it does.”
Thematically, these poems address loss after transformative experiences, admitting to a reader, “All night I might fathom taking back / something precious / that somehow, / long ago, or not so long ago, I don’t know, / ripped off, / yanked from bone, / sloughed off like a husk.”
These poems are about getting to know one’s body after being distanced from it, of recognizing a queer brown body inextricably belonging to lineages of loss, and then realizing that some new body has emerged from where the old parts were lost, or taken, as in the final sequence of four poems, “Lechuza Sketches,” where the speaker manifests the Tex-Mexican folkloric figure of a lechuza, the human-owl hybrid said to inhabit parts of South Texas and the Northern Mexican border.
In the end, this is a collection of poems about more deeply engaging with one’s queerness, one’s brownness, and understanding that there are parts inside us we never knew existed, or as the Lechuza Sketches speaker offers, “In the world, some part of us is often / unseen / & not glorious. / But what if we are? / Glorious. Seen.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597098991
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	05/21/2019
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Joe Jiménez is the author of the poetry collection The Possibilities of Mud and Bloodline, a young adult novel. Jiménez is the recipient of the 2016 Letras Latinas/ Red Hen Press Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared on the PBS NewsHour and Lambda Literary sites. Jiménez was recently awarded a Lucas Artists Literary Artists Fellowship from 2017-2020. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, and is a member of the Macondo Writing Workshops.
For more information, visit joejimenez.net

Read an Excerpt

Lechuza Sketch #11i

All my life I will stand on the dark pier.

The wing will shiver & quake.

Gulls leave me behind.

Yes, I know there is not one saved
place for every live thing

in the world.

Yes, I know.
A storm in the Gulf

in my body: the lovesong of echoes
& cliffs.

Over time, my face will clack, it will
croak.

This body will crash into light.

Fickle memory. Sickle salt.

Some hours, I don’t know
if I am becoming something better.

In the world, some part of us is often
unseen
& not glorious.

But what if we are?
Glorious. Seen.

Mesquites

In a field a plethora of mesquites grew.
Rampantly, some of them unruly. Wildness
and fending off shames. Shames? you may ask.
For being bent, for shaping in unnatural ways.
It was said. And so it was—.
But magic, for none of these were trees
in the sense that trees should take root
and not tremble or growl or know Love
for one other. Water and wind. Earth,
Light. Saplings, thus groves. And some spread
their seed pods for the sole sake of giving them
up or taking another’s seed. And pleasure
and wildness—. Earth and Light.
And this was the world.

Then. Something emerged
among the mesquites. And overcome,
unprepped, how the mesquites suffered—
Over time, seed pods grew strange, dire.
The field soon became a field.
People witnessed. Mesquites began
gradually, forthwith, to die off—.
So many of them. No one
could halt that suffering, though so many tried.
And distance and Grief—.
And heavy murk where once fullness
and Joy, and Wonder. A sad hymn
of sinews: mottled shadows, emptiness—.
For years, the hymn hummed.
Harrowed, the field knew somberness
as if it were wind and Light,
the field knew erosion and understood
what loss uttered to its bones: the spirits
of every bird and the tall yellow grasses,
the souls of all the mosses
and the armadillos
digging grubs from the most tender soils,
the little deer
who relied on the mesquites
for shade, the coyotes who satisfied hungers
with the pods—. For many years, then: loss,
affliction, tribulation, woe…

Editorial Reviews

"Where were these poems when I was lost in a Mictlan of my own making? They leave a throbbing in the flesh like fanged teeth. Antidote: run for your pen. A gorgeous collection que me dejó con envidia." —Sandra Cisneros

"First, I thought desire the core of these gorgeous lyrics—belly hunger, eros, a near ecclesial pang to be good. Joe Jiménez makes palpable a world of things to want, sometimes despite how they might cut—mesquite and teeth, thick arms and bedfuls of nopales, tattoos and gleaming gar fish. But then I wondered—what are all these owls doing here? Harbingers of death, these raptors rap against the cage of the poet’s ribs, the poet rapt in loves some insist he die for and some he would choose to die for. This fearless and beautiful book follows a man who knows the difference and loves them all anyway." —Douglas Kearney

"There is so much desire, loneliness, and ultimately a longing for love in these sensuous, honest, and searing poems. So many questions, so much beautiful emptiness in return. Joe Jiménez exhibits poetic skill throughout—from the marvelous use of repetition, which leads to a kind of intensity and earnestness, to the often-surprising and sparkling imagery. He writes: '…but I also want to make beautiful things. Sometimes, I want others to/see me/as beautiful, too. Not rough, not voracious…' Jiménez has made a beautiful voracious thing—Rattlesnake Allegory, a brilliant book of poems by a poet I will keep my eye on for years to come." —Victoria Chang, author of Barbie Chang

"The lyric echoes & queer longing of Joe Jiménez’s Rattlesnake Allegory deftly deconstruct the space between the body & the environment it navigates. For Jiménez, the body itself takes form as “a nest braided in hush,” & desire a snake that coils within, & stays." —Matty Layne Glasgow

"A beautifully rendered meditation on love, desire, and the body. Most powerful when read aloud. Ultimately it's about survival, and I love the way so many different intersecting concerns like being Latinx and existing in nepantla come into play."—Rodney Gomez, poet laureate of McAllen, Texas

From the Publisher