Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poems
BY LISA RUSS SPAAR
A Review of Second Poetry Collections by Michelle Peñaloza, All the Words I Can Remember are Poems (Persea, 2025) and Valencia Robin, Lost Cities (Persea, 2025).
Newly named United States Poet Laureate Arthur Sze has spoken for many, perhaps all, poets when he addresses the limitations of language. Words, he suggests, can bring us to the edges of human expression of experience, “after which the reader must step beyond language” and find other means to move into the transformative articulation of meanings. “The problem,” poet Brian Teare writes in Poem Bitten by a Man (Nightboat Books, 2023), “is how to make language more, a dimension that holds & meets multiple demands: love, work, death, art.” (Emphasis mine.) In an interview about his Poem with Dante Silva at Nightboat, Teare elaborates on how drawing on the artistic processes of collaging and assemblage offered him a way to create this sense of linguistic “more”:
On one level, that’s what collage affords: each snip of the scissors or the cursor is a bite. On another level, biting is libidinal, the end result of a deep desire finally released, so there is great satisfaction and also pleasure in it. The cut allows for destruction before the paste allows for a form of repair. Both gestures say to me always: more, more, more!
In their recently published second books of poems, Michelle Peñaloza and Valencia Robin likewise draw on modalities of visual art—for Peñaloza, collage; for Robin, abstract painting and assemblage—to create textual dimensions that hold and meet, as Teare puts it, “multiple demands” in their poems. Both poets are, in fact, practitioners of the art forms whose processes inform and illuminate their poetry, and vice versa, and artwork by each is featured on the covers of both books.
Born in Detroit to Filipino immigrants, Michelle Peñaloza was raised in Nashville, later earning her MFA from the University of Oregon. She currently lives in Covelo, California. Her debut collection, Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, won the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize and was published by Inlandia Books in 2019. She is also the author of two chapbooks. Her honors include the Poetry Foundation’s Frederick Bock Prize, and she has received support from the Philippine American Writers and Artists (PAWA) and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her second full-length collection, All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems—winner of the 2024 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award and the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award, given to recognize and support a second book of poetry—has just appeared from Persea Books, replete with full-color plates of Peñaloza’s original collages that complement the book’s riveting poems. Making new forays into her first book’s themes of intergenerational inheritances, usurpations, and hauntings—in food, flora, fauna, love, history, and, perhaps especially, Filipino words themselves–this second collection leans into the frisson of optimism and lament with what the Laughlin Award judges call a “startling and subversive joy.”
In an artist’s statement accompanying an anthology of her collages in a January 2024 issue of Seventh Wave, Peñaloza said that at that time she had only been working in collage for about a year. Yet the technique, which allows for borrowings, layerings, and contiguities from an array of sources, seems a natural form for Peñaloza, whose work has always been haunted by past, present, and future experiences, particularly as they relate to her Filipino heritage. “Collage,” she writes in her statement, “like poetry, is a series of choices; it is a gathering process. Both poetry and collage can feel transformative, alchemical. In collage, as in poetry, using scale, juxtaposition, and layers (creating and uncovering them), one can re(dis)cover latent narrative, create new meanings and associations, and communicate multiple truths; both mediums are ripe for reimagining, for collapsing time and space and the various veils between us.” The notion of “collage” is, in fact, everywhere in this second volume. Words in Tagalog, Filipino, and English exchange their secrets with another without ever being “othered.” Ancestors, friends, places, histories, lost and new lovers, children miscarried, and children yet to come coexist with contagious verve and hope. We see this in the poems; we see this in the collages, which like the poems bring together materials that are personal (family photographs) and archival (postcards, historical photographs, maps), as well as lavish, richly hued and abundant images of flowers, fruits, and textiles.
Some of the poems and collages in the book are deliberately paired by a shared title, such as the poem/collage “Stereograph: After A Typhoon—Wherever the Roof Lands, There the Filipino Makes His Home, 1912,” in which the poem speaks back to a labeled photograph retrieved from the Library of Congress that can be viewed through a “stereograph”—an early device with allows two side-by-side photographs to be viewed simultaneously through a stereoscope, creating an illusion of three-dimensionality. The poem takes its title from a patronizing caption on a photo of displaced Filipino homes. Peñaloza’s poem is formed of two fully justified blocks of language that mimic the shapes of two photographs held side by side. The text can be read both horizontally (across the space between the two columns) or vertically. (Peñaloza uses this “stereograph” form several times throughout Part Two, which draws significantly on archival materials that misrepresent or misinterpret Filipino history and culture.)
In “Wherever the Roof Lands,” for example, Peñaloza refutes the photo caption’s suggestion that Filipinos lead a rather hapless existence, going wherever the rains take them, and instead evokes the notion of bayanihan, a long Filipino communal and spiritual practice of people deliberately helping one another by literally moving houses from one place to another in response to various hardships, movements that eschew the binary (“Indio. Filipino.”) and instead celebrate a replicative and fluid rebuilding: “We know / this land always provides—kawayan, / nipa, kahoy, dahon—what we need / to rebuild again and again and again and / again and again and again and again and / again and again and again and again and / again.” The accompanying collage creates a visual sense of this recurrence, overlaying the archival photographs, one horizontal and one vertical, with an image of a structure that is both rooted but also afloat, a kind of radiant altar or sanctuary topped with a gorgeous fruited bloom of Filipino flora (“Any fool knows a roof / intact is no miracle but a blessing of / design”). Both poem and collage show that true homes are not built from foundations of cement “but in the many / arms come together to move a house: // a choice.” Or, depending upon how the reader engages with the text, vertically or horizontally, “. . . to move a house: // again.”
Other collages and poems don’t share titles, but their physical proximity seems intentional: enlightening and moving. This is particularly evident in the book’s last poem, an anguished, beautiful, nine-part, flush-right sequence “To My Little One (and their little one and their little one), Long After I Am Gone.” The poem (delivered in short, old-school telegraph-style end-stopped phrases) is part prayer, part family history, part appeal for forgiveness for what humans have done to one another and to the planet. The poem opens this way:
Not sure you will ever.
Exist survive to read this.
Writing this maybe I will.
You into the future are you.
OK maybe the future has.
Now rewritten over us but.
Here’s a dispatch from the past.
. . . . . . . .
Drink do you have water have you.
Smelled a flower seen a tree a fish.
Your lolo used to collect them.
Small oceans in vast suburbia to.
Remember his first home odds-on.
That’s gone now but maybe you’re.
Reading this hope you are not.
Totally alone hope you have.
People hope this quaint hope.
You’re reading this inside.
An Old library full of sunlight.
After the fourth section of this long poem, in which the speaker has been recounting the complexity of her relationship with her mother (“Truly we drove one another. / Crazy mother & daughter”) and with family in general (“Family has been to never say. / And always be so very sorry. / For all the facts and secrets,”) we encounter the collage “Q&A/Ma & Me,” which depicts photographs of the poet’s mother with a garden hose, tending a cascade of offspring and ancestors with a sequined shower of shimmering orbs and nimbuses, over maps and images of the Philippines. The collage is a visual version of the poem, layering over choppy strips of maps, figures, and black and white photographs a fluid, brightly colored swell of intergenerational connectedness.
In the ninth and last section of the poem, the speaker reiterates that she cannot know if her descendants will even exist or, if they do, admits that she understands why they might not choose to accept the “invitation” of an ancestor implicated in the destruction of their world. And then, as if literally turning to the stove to prepare a meal for her beloveds to come, the speaker begins to recount the best way to crush garlic, and to wash and measure rice:
. . . the best way to get.
The most flavor wash rice.
Until all the milky water turns.
Clear close a peace sign let.
Your two fingers rest atop the.
Grains measure the right amount.
Of water the first crease of your.
Hands these are the ways.
We’ve always said there is love.
All the way from here I am.
We are all rushing toward.
The future to meet you.
This extraordinary poem is followed by a last collage, “Novena,” that closes the book. A “novena” (from Latin for “novem,” nine) is a ritualistic, devotional prayer repeated for nine consecutive days. This reiterated prayer is made as a particular petition, perhaps for grace or atonement. Peñaloza means for her “Novena” to complement her nine-part poem. In the collage, long strips (like the paper ribbons of text in old telegraphs that are evoked in the telegraphic lines of the poem) are threaded horizontally and woven like warp threads through the weft of a loom, with the strips left at uneven lengths, loose and free at both the top and bottom. A garden of profuse flowers blooms from the woven text, beneath which we can barely see the handwritten caption of a photograph depicting a rice paddy filled with dead Filipinos killed during the so-called “Philippine Insurrection” (an earlier poem in the book, “The Captions Are Handwritten” explores this event). The woven “text” of “Novena” feels part prayer mat, part overgrown grave, part garden, part dinner table, on and around which flutter a host of butterflies and moths, Peñaloza’s eidolons, her ghosts and winged spirits of beloveds, belonging at once to all times. Which is the gift of the poems and the artwork of this very special poet and her book.
Michelle Peñaloza, Novena
Encyclopedia, magazine, and seed catalog clippings on paper, 12 x 18
2023
*
Valencia Robin was raised in Milwaukee but spent much of her early adult life in Michigan, where she earned an MFA in art and design from the University of Michigan and was a co-founder of GalleryDAAS, also in Ann Arbor. She subsequently earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia, where for a time she also worked as the director of the Young Writers Workshop. Her first book, Ridiculous Light, won the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and was published by Persea Books in 2019. Ridiculous Light was also a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and was named one of the best poetry collections of 2019 by Poetry Journal. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Emily Clark Balch Prize from Virginia Quarterly Review. Robin currently teaches in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University.
“Language marks us,” Valencia Robin writes in an Artist’s Statement for a show of her paintings, Mother Tongue, at Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2023:
Indeed, as an African-American woman from the working-class, I’m all too aware of how the words I use and the way I speak is intricately bound up with power, how social spaces and institutions—schools, work, government—control the use of language, how language allows certain groups to gain credibility and access while marking others as unworthy of those things. I’m also aware of why the English language is my language, all too aware of my relationship to conquest and empire and how that puts me in dialogue with so much of the world—those lucky enough to still have their native tongues and those who have no idea what language their ancestors spoke. Noam Chomsky says a language is not just words, it’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. Which is to say, the loss of a language is bound up with countless other losses. And there’s so much more I could say; I haven’t even touched on the constant distraction and threat of language at its worst, its effect not just on public discourse, but on our physical safety, none of which is new. Instead, why not end where I began, with poetry, not the kind made of words, but of paint and canvas, color and texture, conscious thought and unconscious desire, a space of transformation, my first language perhaps.
“My first language perhaps.” Robin reminds us here that most humans who take pen, pencil, crayon, chalk, what have you, in hand will most likely “draw” or mark before they write words. The abstract paintings of Valencia Robin have, in fact, the freshness of much of the “first art” of children—the canvases are often built up on layers of white, sometimes bifurcated by a central vertical line that creates the appearance of an opened book, or are stitched with plus signs and x’s. The colors are vibrant, primary, and the layered surfaces are populated with some of the first shapes we learn to recognize and draw—squares, rectangles, circles. There are scribbles of pencil—sometimes fragments of phrases, sentences, sometimes just loops and lines. The titles often read like little poems: “When I Say Vibe, You Say Vibration”; “And Out of this White Noise, A Sustained High C”; “I Have a Time Machine”; “Short Days and the Light Shining Through.” The canvases often look like what one might find if one opened a secret drawer or toolbox, or looked at the inner workings of a magical machine. Sometimes the paintings appear to depict drawers or rooms within drawers or rooms. Shapes within shapes. These abstract wunderkammers charm; they inspire curiosity, engagement. “Reading” these poems, one feels invited in; there is room for the viewer, encouragement to consider the arrangement of shapes, the choice of colors, the wonderful way the entities on the canvas seem both inevitably placed and surprisingly kinetic at once. Reading these paintings, in fact, with their wit and amiability and whiff of mystery, is very much like reading a Valencia Robin poem. The work is welcoming, accessible, but far from simple.
As with the paintings, the poems’ titles are often disarming, whimsical (“Sometimes life feels like daytime TV,” “Hi,” “Sometimes we just like someone,”). Note that the titles are often the first lines of the poem, ending in a comma that signals an open door and a come-on-in to the body of the poem. The speakers feel very present, vernacular, often in quotidian settings, as though Robin is speaking to the reader sitting across the kitchen table or while taking a walk together around the lake. Yet for all their familiarity and humor, the poems are unafraid to take on heavy subjects: racism, the pandemic, loneliness, dislocation.
Part Two, for example, is an inventive, five-“episode” sequence about Lieutenant Uhura from Star Trek. Sometimes the speaker covers the fictional character Nyota Uhura from the Star Trek franchise, but the main speaker is Nichelle Nichols, the actress who portrays Uhura in the original television series and who is considered one of the first black women characters in American television to not play a subservient or menial role. The second poem in the series, “[Episode 2: Inside Woman],” describes, in part, an encounter Nichols has had in real life with Martin Luther King:
Don’t let the spaceship fool you.
It’s cowboys and Indians up here.
Show me an alien species
who’s not interested in turning the cosmos
into condos and I’ll show you this season’s
bad guy, show me an indigenous being
who’s hell-bent on stopping its planet
from being strip-mined and—well,
you get the idea. None of which I thought
about before joining the Enterprise.
I just wanted to be the first
Black woman to see the universe
who wasn’t cooking and cleaning,
wanted to bask in all the fan mail
the network refused to give me.
I would’ve gone back to Broadway
if Dr. King hadn’t begged me to stay,
said thanks to me Black children
and white children, Jews and gentiles,
Protestants and Catholics
wanted to be astronauts
or to play one on TV,
insisted I had a bigger role to play
this look in his eyes,
like he’d live to see it.
The poem begins in Robin’s signature way—familiar, colloquial, wryly witty—but as her voice navigates the poem’s “canvas,” it offers, with a sleight-of-hand “light” tone, insights into the ways in which her experience of a canned sci-fi fictional world and real world network high jinks reveal deeper social ills—rampant capitalism, sexism, climate damage—until the poem stuns us in a culminating ironic twist of hope, fate, and tragedy.
Robin explores her own praxis as poet and artist in a poem called “Abstract Painting”:
Her nephew, the tax attorney,
her nephew, her heart
asks what the painting she’s painting
means, assumes she knows the answer
beyond the urge to make something,
the feeling she wakes to every morning
and, oh, the blanket of starlings
covering the lawn of this house
she never thought she’d own, only trying
because the guy she was dating
said she’d never get a mortgage. And
if only she could’ve harnessed that mettle,
she’d use it now for what really matters—
a better jerk detector, more time with her nephew
or a painting that means whatever
dozens of iridescent black bodies mean
when they take off and land, take off and land.
This two-sentence wonder, with its mix of tenderness (“her nephew, her heart”), humor (“a better jerk detector”), and beauty (those starlings!), embodies a marvelous description not only of how abstract painting can function (the sense Agnes Martin had of trying to paint not geese themselves but “the emotions we feel when we see geese descending”). It also conflates actual black bodies in motion with words (“iridescent black bodies”) used to express them, words that, like birds, can suggest meaning when they “take off and land, take off and land” in artful ways.
Robin’s paintings often seem to offer us a choose-your-own-adventure maze of pathways among their assembled marks and shapes; likewise her poems are on the move, nimbly traversing the spaces between past and present, lost and found. For Robin, one impetus for this movement is a deep appreciation for the people and cities she’s lost in her desire to move forward—as a person and an artist—as the way opens, taking off and landing, taking off and landing.
Robin Valencia, When I Say Vibe You Say Vibration
Acrylic and pencil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
2022
In a conversation at the International Examiner, Michelle Peñaloza said “I think that to be Filipinx American—or really to be any child of immigrants—is to always be bridging distances between the homeland that is your parents’ and not yours, but also yours; between the homeland that is yours and not your parents’, but is also theirs. It is the lifelong work of negotiation and renegotiation, filled with shame and joy and pride and questioning and claiming.” As a Black woman in America, Robin surely understands this notion of constantly bridging worlds, and that to do so with any understanding involves a “lifelong work of negotiation and renegotiation.” In both their visual art and their poems, Valencia Robin and Michelle Peñaloza are luminous exemplars of the abundant mix of “joy and pride and questioning and claiming” that artistic expression can inimitably afford.
