Virgin

Starred review from December 18, 2017
Sotelo explores the power of mythologizing personal history in her striking debut, winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize. The collection is divided into seven sections—Taste, Revelation, Humiliation, Pastoral, Myth, Parable, and Rest Cure—and from the start Sotelo cultivates intimacy through moments of vulnerability. For example, in “Summer Barbecue with Two Men,” she writes, “Tonight, the moon looks like Billie Holiday, trembling/ because there are problems other people have/ & now I have them, too.” Each section is loosely themed; for example, in “Humiliation,” Sotelo deals with shame in a variety of situations, while the poems in “Pastoral” revolve around issues with a father figure. Familiar figures from Greek myths—namely Persephone, Ariadne, and Theseus— are recurring symbols that serve as a means to probe the darker sides of human behavior. In “Death Wish,” Theseus battles suicidal ideation and is later seen “bleeding from/ his head to his hands,/ like Christ without clear cause.” In the subsequent poem, he declares, “I’m only good/ at killing what I know, then taking off.” The book is also replete with novel images, as when Sotelo describes a heart as “a lake where young geese// go missing, show up bloody// after midnight.” With humanity and raw honesty, Sotelo finds fresh ways to approach romance, family, and more.

May 15, 2018

Winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize, this dazzling new collection from Sotelo (Nonstop Godhead) seems written with opal grit. The poet highlights female subjugation to male assumptions and desires ("I am beautiful in my harmlessness!") but offers considerable pushback, as Sotelo explores what women really want. In one poem, the speaker envisions her man fleeing "once he sees how far & wide, / how dark & deep// this frigid female mind can go"; elsewhere, "When I'm with a man, I drag the yolk right out of him." Sensuality and resistance go hand in hand, even as Ariadne surfaces to admonish, "When a man tells you he's a monster, / believe him." VERDICT A moving section of this book clarifies the influences of the poet's artist father, who teaches her the meaning of art: "This one is art. This is what art looks like." She learned her lesson well.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2018

Stein follows up Rough Honey, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, with more rough love. "If you're going to storm, / I said/ do it harder" opens the collection, and elsewhere the speaker insists, "What's wrong/ with me is you." Kneading dough hurts like a bruise, bombs fall like flowers of ice, a woman "kneels on her pain," and what of life? "It's all born lost/ and we just fetch it for a little while." Yet if these poems are mordant, they're also rich and sensual and glittering, and Stein delivers some bold aperçus: "the ruin I've made is in one piece," says one poem, and elsewhere "I have a turnstile heart." VERDICT If Stein wants to spin "to lose my bearings," she wants us to spin, too. Excellent poetry.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2018
Despite the coyly turned woman on the cover, the first poem in this incisive collection is bold, baldly declaring, I'm not afraid of sex. / I'm afraid of his skeleton / knocking against the headboard / in the middle of the night. A few poems later comes the thesis: We're all performing our bruises. Indeed, this is a collection that finds the wounds of childhood and new adulthood and presses on them. It's less about womanhood and virginity and more about how they are weighed in society. See how an object can change / when a new person wants it, writes Sotelo, a self-proclaimed Mexican American fascinator, as she traverses these ideas in poems that are wry, caustic, and often wounded. There are echoes of Sylvia Plath in her odes to a hard and absent father, in her reflections on family history, and in her repeated explorations of the Minotaur myth. Brutal in execution but with a bitingly humorous undercurrent, this collection lays bare an image of femininity in our society, even as Sotelo keeps some things close to the chest. It does matter, she writes. I don't have to tell you why. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)