Driving Without a License

April 18, 2016
An undocumented Filipina-American discovers present-day California, teen culture, car culture, prejudice, love, blue-collar and white-collar work, and marriage in Joseph’s absorbing, detailed, and timely debut. Joseph’s governing figure, the automobile, connects her straightforward narratives to other, more elaborate, poetic goals. She vividly renders the tactics and the fears of immigrant families who live in fear of the law (“I hear they raid when you’re naked/ in bed Packed like a sardine”) and juxtaposes kids trying not to get deported with others trying to purchase alcohol: “I held up my wallet// with its empty slot. See./ What good is it then, they said// to be legal?” Joseph animates scenes from the Phillipines and older relatives’ tropical memories, though her dynamism emerges most in poems about cars, dating, road trips, and car repair. A sonnet crown about a marriage juxtaposes traditional celebration with the new couple’s practical difficulties: “Choosing to know nothing about the heart/ means sorting our mail and leaving.” Through her variety of lines, of old and new forms, and of voices adopted and inhabited, Joseph, herself Filipina-American, does justice to the raw emotions around immigration with verve: “my child// will be called an anchor/ with hands at its throat.”

April 1, 2016

Of course, growing up means hanging out with a car-crazy boyfriend and learning to drive without a license; it means being "interested in it and doing what with it,/ I didn't know, but wanted it, and wanted it/ fast." Yet when you are an undocumented immigrant, raised in California but born in the Philippines, growing up is profoundly and scarily more. In her first collection, Joseph clarifies what it's like always to be in hiding "--which kept me in school and was, of course,/ a lie." As she guides us through constant fearfulness ("I hear they raid when you're naked/ in bed") and unimaginable hurt ("D. said I--and by I she meant those// like me--should die"), Joseph blends everyday anxieties with deeper ones, avoiding outright reportage for smarter inflection. The tensions of visiting the immigration lawyer's office, for instance, are seen in the mad drive away. VERDICT A gifted writer's view on an all-American issue. [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/15.]

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