![]() The poems Mara produces out of the struggle to survive do not redeem ruined words so much as account, patiently, for their ruin and remaking. In all these instances she is talking about survival. ![]() It becomes impossible to sort the high-minded invisible labor of the poet’s search for a perfect paradise from the invisible domestic labor of keeping herself safe in a perishable paradise. The working poet, in Mara’s book, is also the body that goes gluten-free, braids her lover’s hair, and waits in an infinite line for gasoline in the wake of a superstorm. Her embodiment as a poet is not generally romantic. These are the labors that sustain her career as a poet-she is not always and forever holding a seashell to her ear and swooning, though she does that too. Here is the poet sifting through old documents on her computer, here she is teaching a class over the sound of a groundskeeper mowing the lawn and singing, here she is giving a reading in the swelter of a university cafeteria. Rather than showing us the poem as commodity-fully formed, standing apart from the poet on the page-Mara’s book shows us the daily life of its making. The links are in some sense simple: hers is a body that makes both poems and babies, and the inner world that produces them is not neatly divided into separate spheres. And yet, Mara’s new work explores the links between these two forms of labor that are not valued under capitalism. That’s the kind of labor we tend to reduce to the body-the dishwashing, breastfeeding body that sweats and takes up space even as most societies wish and will it out of sight. It is not invisible in the same way that maternal and domestic labor is invisible. The labor of writing poems is invisible because it happens mostly in the silence of thought, which we tend to imagine takes place in the mind rather than the body. ![]() Mara Pastor’s new book of poems, Falsa heladería ( False Ice Cream Shop) emerges from a double exhaustion and takes a big breath-then lets loose a current of sound-from the other side. But what happens when the poet tires of her labor? In English, this word for work is the same as the word for what a woman must do to push a baby out of her body and into the world. To make sure the flame of the tongue stays lit in the storm of speech. To make sure the mouth doesn’t hang off its hinges. We know that the task of the poet is to renovate ruined words, to make language livable again. So many perfectly good words have been ruined: Promise. Se acabaron las promesas, / decían nuestros carteles. A Spanish translation follows the English.
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