Barrelhouse Reviews: This is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album, by Alan Chazaro

Review by Jose Hernandez Diaz

Black Lawrence Press / September, 2019 / 40 pp

Alan Chazaro’s This Is Not A Frank Ocean Cover Album explores what it means to grow up as a Chicano/Latino young man in the Bay Area: backyard boxing, parties, veiled tenderness, hyphy, beat-boxing, freestyles, hoops, graffiti, skateboarding, and being lost yet found in brotherhood. With intelligent musicality, Chazaro takes us back and forth over the Bay Bridge, into the diverse neighborhoods where he learned his own language for poetry and art.

We can tell we are in the Bay Area from the jump: in “580 West,” Chazaro describes driving on the Bay Bridge, Lake Merritt, and a Warriors jersey, among other elements. We also catch some of the Bay Area’s famous lingo in this poem, a tic that repeats across the collection. Moreover, we immediately dive into Chazaro’s hybrid world of bravado and feeling: “Briana says she wants to catch a vibe. Jerome / says you can catch these hands. I float around the city while Odd // Future grooves into an empty background.” Fittingly, this group of young and hip passengers is listening to Odd Future, an avant-garde west coast rap group. In Chazaro’s world, poetry and hip hop are a part of daily life.  At the end of the poem, the speaker gets surreal with it, describing flowers on the side of the freeway: “These flowers are too loud for me; I can hear them singing off-key with my window rolled all the way up.” The discarded flowers, not unlike Odd Future’s lyrics (or Chazaro’s poetry), are beauty in the otherwise rough world.

Later, in “Some of Our Boyhoods,” Chazaro writes of the influence of his older cousins, who serve as role models and are “where we got our cool from.” The speaker and his friends try to emulate these cousins, “pretending like we knew / what good weed smelled like, / how to slide / a condom on.” In Chazaro’s gritty world, young men grow up fast and pretend to be seasoned vets, so that others might not laugh and call them “fa**,” as the boys in this poem do to another boy who shows emotion when his hamster dies. Even children are expected to show no emotion when they have to finish off a hamster with a rock.

In “Julio César Chávez vs Oscar De La Hoya, 1996,” Chazaro investigates how a fierce boxing match between two men stands for the differences in two approaches to Chicano identity: the “real” Mexican versus the sellout. In this poem, the speaker’s dad and his dad’s friends all root for Julio César Chávez. The men perceive him as the true warrior and true Mexican for his bravery and machismo, while De La Hoya appears to be a sellout or American puppet—presumably because he speaks English and has nice hair. When the speaker sees De La Hoya entering the ring with “his mixed-up outfit, a combo / of US and Mexican flags,” he realizes he probably should’ve cheered or “smiled” for the Pocho (De La Hoya) like him (the speaker), but he doesn’t, instead choosing to keep it real with his father and his father’s friends rooting for Chávez. The poem reveals various social barriers between Chicanos in the US: not only do you have to conform to the macro culture to some extent, but you have to appear to be “real” enough for the Latinx community.

Next, in “Backyard Boxing,” Chazaro describes how young men in his Bay Area neighborhood used backyard boxing as a way to test their boyhoods and reach for manhood, while mimicking their role models and/or idols. The speaker eventually becomes numb from such a hard-nosed childhood, saying that after so many punches he’d “forgotten how to hurt.” Although these punches are coming as “skinny, weak / haymakers” from teenagers, the boys’ visceral intent to become the tough, macho men they grew up idolizing in rap and sports speaks to the dilemma of their childhoods: their bodies are young, but their minds respond to the lure of machismo.

In “Untitled Memory,” Chazaro offers a final homage to the Bay Area, not only his home but his muse. Sitting in a tow-away zone in Oakland, waiting for someone, the speaker is at peace on Broadway with his comic book: West Coast Avengers. Not even the smell of piss or weed or clouds or graffiti can diminish his loyalty to the Bay. In fact, the everyday fusion of these elements is what makes the Bay unique and vibrant. The mixture of filthy and sublime in the Bay are what made Chazaro the man and poet he is today; in This is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album, he intently honors this connection.

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Electric Literature, Huizache, Iowa Review, The Nation, Poet Lore, Poetry, The Progressive, Witness, and in the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. His chapbook of prose poems, The Fire Eater, is forthcoming in spring 2020 with Texas Review Press.