Barrelhouse Reviews: Wild Invocations, by Ysabel Y. Gonzalez

Review by Dimitri Reyes

Get Fresh Books / March, 2019 / 70 pp

Wild Invocations is a necessary debut collection by Ysabel Y. González that sings with the vocal range of Nina Simone, bangs as loud as tin-tun-teros, and cuts clean like a b-girl toprock across linoleum. Set in various locations throughout Newark, the Bronx, and Puerto Rico, her words dream up buildings from the page while rhythmic tonality flutters in phrases like “Brick City babies come out their mothers shaped like stone, / the kind of red that takes root in skyscrapers, / kind of uncrumbled piece you think deserves paint.” González’s textured imagery is second only to her overall narrative about the reclamation of the speaker’s voice against the backdrop of a Nuyorican landscape from the early 1990s to the early 2000s. This book’s particular power will effectively serve black and brown youth; González’s poems vocalize at a decibel level that teens and young adults can clearly hear while they navigate relationships with family, friends, and strangers, and learn how to negotiate their self-worth.

One of the early poems of Wild Invocations, “Because Brown Women’s Bodies Are Told We Take Up Too Much Space, When I Inhale I Make Sure It’s Breath I Need,” carries a large weight just in its title. González does weighty work within the poem, too:

And I’m every brown woman you’ve ever met,
struggling to make space even when we accommodate,
even when we peek our heads into ugly little rooms, double-checking

that we’ll fit

It’s one of many poems where the speaker experiences a reckoning and the reader begins to notice questions imposed and then later addressed while journeying through the different spaces of the collection. In this way, the audience moves with the speaker as the speaker begins to develop a metacognitive dialogue to pick apart socioethnic politics. This journey of self-discovery and the development of language helps Wild Invocations read with the energy of a first book.

In 2011, Aracelis Girmay, in an interview with the Rumpus Poetry Book Club, said about hybrid poetry and exploring identity, “I wonder what new explorations of form might have to do with documenting the new and old ways of thinking about power. Of how we’ve been taught to think by our families, institutions, television, computer culture, etc. […] Perhaps the so-called hybrid poems are about dislocating or splintering the central lens.” González would likely agree. Striking a balance between casual stanzaic formation and a wavy free verse, González’s words are poignant but also purposeful. Her book is a map of ideas of universality and power. “Recalling Where I’m From” is a beautiful example:

I name stars, call them
            Closed Thigh, Freed Feet
Sparkling scorches, I want to be back

            I’m her shifting myself
thinly across the planet,
            molding to prairies,

threaded to mountains

…

            You’ll find flecks
of my flesh in falling

            light & when you see me,
make a wish
            I’ll whip though Earth,

Not all of the poems focus on self-discovery and retrospection. Much of the book is anchored in place, as shown in her “Brick City” poems. Brick City, the nickname lovingly used by residents of Newark, New Jersey, harkens back to a time when the roads were laid with brick. González’s Newark poems lobby for the voice of a city to be heard and its dialogue to be changed. She embeds anger, fight, nostalgia, and hometown pride into her work and focuses on the conditions of a Newark Renaissance in her poems “Brick City Serenade for Love’s First Kiss,” and “Brick City.” She writes, “And now a renaissance brims, constructed out of / gutted ground for the rich   But Brown & Black / always get to give grit, right?”

For over a decade, Newark has been subjected to a gentrification push similar to what’s happening in multiple other cities across America. Though gentrification looks great to many, González speaks for the individuals who get driven out of the city with the rising cost of living or who generally fade into the shadows of the buildings that crowd “revitalized” districts:

But our refusal to burn is what keeps us
& the thought

of how much smiling we’re going to do
when they find us blended into murals   Find us in the foundation,
find us in the city’s parks & statues, street signs

holding revolution   Find us
in the stories they’re unable to raze.

Wild Invocations stays true to the name it bears. Both student and teacher, visceral and concrete, this collection celebrates itself and dances, fully realized, through the world around it. González’s poetic eye resides in her crown chakra, as if she, herself, is Azabache. I look forward to what power, protection, and insight will be in her later works—and there will be later works:

Cloaked in forbidden faith, scoling scepter in my
Borinquen grasp    I will last.

Dimitri Reyes is a Puerto-Vegan poet, educator, organizer, and YouTuber from Newark, New Jersey. He is the recipient of SLICE Magazine's 2017 Bridging the Gap Award for Emerging Poets, and a finalist for the 2017 Arcturus Poetry Prize from the Chicago Review of Books. He has organized large-scale poetry events such as #PoetsforPuertoRicoNewark. Reyes has read at venues such as The Dodge Poetry Festival, Split This Rock, Busboys and Poets, and the American Poetry Museum. His work is published or forthcoming in Vinyl, Kweli, Entropy, Cosmonauts, Obsidian, Acentos, and others. You can find him documenting the poetry community on YouTube here.