For Want of Water

July 1, 2017

In this urgent and lyrically astute new compilation, Philippines-born Pimentel, winner of the American Book Award for Insides She Swallowed, writes about the huge divide between El Paso, TX, and murder-slicked, drug war-ravaged Juarez directly across the Rio Grande. Accomplished poet that she is, Pimentel does not offer reportage but leaps from a beginning poem, "If I Die in Juarez" ("The violins in our home are emptied/ of sound") to meditations on male violence, female vulnerability, and desert-driven thirst that touch fiercely if impressionistically on the topic. "House of her body, animal in grief" says Pimentel in a fine, multipaneled portrait of her mother, who appears elsewhere as a bride awaiting a goat's sacrifice at her wedding. In other poems, a couple trembles on the brink, Gustav Klimt's The Kiss appears less than tender, and, in the title piece, a boy trudging across the sands cannot waste bodily fluid in tears. VERDICT Affecting and well wrought; Pimentel is a poet to watch.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 18, 2017
Rising from the heat of the Mexican-American border, Filipina-American Pimentel’s gripping and complex debut, a 2016 National Poetry Series winner, draws a line between the mirror cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, while the poet’s native Philippines looms in the background. These poems are marked by troubled love and ambivalence, particularly in regard to violence: “We say it’s the last, we say just one more./ We say the war we’re not responsible. We say// we won’t. Then we pull roses, petals leaking/ thread, red blossoming their glass tombs.” Such complicated feelings are not for Juárez alone. In El Paso, “Women and men rumble the distance,/ the television on but politely muted, walls/ glaring with the passing of the unnamed dead.” Through Pimentel’s gaze, readers are encouraged to see the body as a conflicted space of both tenderness and disaster. She excels at crafting a gorgeous language that drapes around the coarseness of the world; poems that confront the challenging topics of crack addiction, familial assault, and loss are suffused with an almost erotic sensuality. Even the cataloguing of mundane moments (dancing lessons, a Thai massage, air travel) explodes the everyday into a remarkably sumptuous landscape. The thirst to find benevolence inside brutality, just as one thirsts for oases in the desert, runs through these pages.