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Carmen Giménez Smith dares to demand renewal for a world made unrecognizable
Be Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world. The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines that excoriate and sanctify. Carmen Giménez Smith turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion-against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it. This reckoning with self and nation demonstrates that who and where we are is as conditional as the fact of our compliance: "Miss America from sea to shining sea / the huddled masses have a question / there is one of you and all of us." Be Recorder is unrepentant and unstoppable, and affirms Giménez Smith as one of the most vital and vivacious poets of our time.
Be Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world. The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines that excoriate and sanctify. Carmen Giménez Smith turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion-against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it. This reckoning with self and nation demonstrates that who and where we are is as conditional as the fact of our compliance: "Miss America from sea to shining sea / the huddled masses have a question / there is one of you and all of us." Be Recorder is unrepentant and unstoppable, and affirms Giménez Smith as one of the most vital and vivacious poets of our time.
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Reviews
"With an urgency propelled by largely unpunctuated language and nimble lines, Giménez Smith careens between devastating accounts of racial and xenophobic violence . . . while taking on gentrification and border walls, white feminism and late capitalism, Giménez Smith manages to frame a queer, Latinx, immigrants' daughter, motherhood poetics that's entirely her own."
The New York Times Book Review
"As she documents a range of subjects"
including reality TV, capitalism and the exploitation of immigrant workers
"With a powerful allegiance to the freedom of free verse, Giménez Smith tells a sort of fragmentary superhero origin story about a girl who faces the disdain of her country to become a woman, poet, and mother. . . . For Giménez Smith, there is no distance between the personal and the political, such that they don't even need separate words."
NPR.org