¡Manteca! - - - An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets

This one is hefty - - - over 400 pages, 200+plus poems, forty poets. Filled to bursting with love, and pride, and hope, and no small measure of singing and dancing and bongo music. Among this burst of good feelings there are a few yelps of outright hostility, aimed at the world, the Spaniards (who wiped out the Taínos), the honkies (who continue to enmesh them), those who wage the wars, those who ignore the culture, those who police them daily.

Yet above and beyond this, it's Boricua blues, and monfongo, and Latin jazz, with Black Boogie - - - and afro-taíno riffs, with merengue feet and garabatopandegato pan and

how many gods/do you know/that can fly/Quetzalcoatl
& his feathers/polished teeth/& scales
flew to Cholula/insisting on something jeweled/& grand
got/the largest pyramid in the world/to show
gathered himself
& let everyone kiss/his wing
every mouth/wanting
a piece /of the god of/
the morning star/everyone's
god-father

So writes Ariana Brown

And here nested 2/3rds way through we find an old friend, one of our favorites from long ago, Miguel Piñero, with his blues lost love riff, the redoubtable mexicana rose

con piel de canela
pelo darker than bustelo café
eyes big like rellenos
color of a ripe avocado
her lips tasted like seasoned mangos and her body was sweet as coconut milk

But Juanita Rosita Esposita is - - - after a "heated chilly pepper tequila fight" - - -

left me like a burnt pork chop
for a chitlin' hamhock buckwheat eatin' man
who wore a watermelon wallet &
a collard green conversation
disturbing my macho machete pride

Which has to be one of the great mementos to interracial interloving intercultural heart-loss tales as good as the best of all time.

§ § §

Most gabacho critics would say that this collection could have been halved by savaging parts of the page-after-page rants, but to those of us who are part of this passion of pride and pride of passion, plus the music of it all: well, we'd be the last to complain.

There are some special treats riding long here, hidden among the burrs nested in the saddle, including "music of/accents/'or else'"/end up at the bottom of the sea/busy trying to get born" (Adrián Castro).

We did nothing
to stop their singing
Fed their dreams
the white meat of the

manipulate their mouths
open
watch them eat the pulp
the color of our nightmare's skin

(Jane Alberdeston Coralin).

Or:

I know your mama didn't/need me? She told me/plenty of times/it was so I'm 6' 2"/and black; never been scared of anything, 'cept/your mama. That little lady/could raise a country/raise hell,/raise me right out of the ground/if she could. (Ariana Brown)

Or,

But, "r," little propeller
of my name, small & beautiful monster
changing shapes, you win . . .
you are the sound of cars racing, the sound
of bicycle spokes fitted with playing cards
to make it sound like we are going fast,
this is our ode to you, little "r"

(Aracelis Girmay).

And most of all, the rare ode to those master artists who give their all, sometimes their freedom, to beautify the bleak blank walls of city freeways, signs, buses, shopfronts, the drab public housing and backgrounds to all of our asphalt citified lives,
we are the ghetto picassos
the modern-day matisses
the artistic shakespeares
that tear white walls in half
we are the street canvas killers
with one quick splat
of an ultra flat black
with silver outlines
& yellow highlights, perfected
during 3 a.m. night skylines (Bonafide Rojas).