Body of Render

March 12, 2021
There is a jagged urgency to award-winning and CantoMundo Fellow Zamor's sixth book. The opening section, ""At the Hand of Other,"" consists of 30 one-stanza poems that each lean toward memory and immediacy while the poet seeks balance within a staggering sense of loss. ""Poem to America"" reads: "oh / society oh; what you cull, piece by piece; what / you strip; what grows back only in time." Zamora doesn't mince words in this frank collection of political verse meant to speak for the voiceless. She succeeds, as in ""The retreat"": "here, in space with strangers, your / mind chants I am enough, I am enough, enough, enough." Zamora writes of people of color and men and women caught up and surrounded while protesting for their rights. Zamora braves through her struggle to reason out the madness of our time. ""If starlight be"" is a bucolic four-part song in which phrases and moods are repeated throughout a call for justice, which concludes with "officials wipe your name, use your / trachea, your tongue to speak, least you begin to forget." Readers will not.

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