Freighted Refuge (excerpt)

For full text, visit : Latin American Review of Books.




Clouds dominate the upper half in one of Sin Nombre‘s (2009) theatrical release posters, as though a tropical storm is tracking the freight train below, carrying passengers on its rooftop through lush-green countryside. This poster’s centre of gravity is a face, of a young woman looking straight at us, framed in delicate fortitude; and immediately behind her is a young man whose line of sight appears engaged on thoughts that vegetate on the tropical landscape the train is passing through.

A native of Honduras, Sayra is the young woman in the poster, played by rising Mexican-actor Paulina Gaitán, and the young man is Casper of Chiapas, Mexico, portrayed by non-professional actor Edgar Flores from Honduras. Two years before this film was released, Gaitán had worked with Kevin Kline in Trade (2007) as a Mexican girl auctioned online for paedophiles. There are vague traces of that girl’s fragility in Gaitán’s Sayra, whose solemn sweetness and strength provide illusions of respite against the script’s controlled accretion of violence embodied in La Mara Salvatrucha, a transnational gang with a chapter in the city of Tapachula in Chiapas, which Casper is a member of.

As a marero, Casper is wary about cultivating a private life; but he pursues one anyway, to nourish a budding romance – as Willy, not Casper – with Martha Marlene (Diana Garcia), whose fragile beauty appears out-of-place in the film’s harsh world, and is soon discarded after following Casper to a gang meeting in a cemetery. Casper immediately suffers punishment before his homies for hiding Martha from them, while their leader – Tenoch Huerta Mejia’s menacing Lil’ Mago – absconds her to a semi-private enclosure under the intimate shade of a tree. Fukunaga takes advantage of this scene for something that complements our perceptions of Lil’ Mago whose face and naked upper-body presents a delirious labyrinth of tattoos, dripping of death, religion, brotherhood, and other icons of pride. When Martha hits her head on a tombstone after resisting his advances and never moves again, the brief shock that freezes Lil’ Mago’s face appears like a seed for an apology to Casper later, who would never know her death was an accident. Instead, Lil’ Mago simply informs Casper that “the Devil took her,” after leaving Martha under the tree.

Martha’s death enrages Casper quietly, as Lil’ Mago continues to hold the plot’s momentum, when he chooses Casper and a new recruit named Smiley for a routine robbery on a freight train carrying US-bound migrants. Obligation and pride simmers in the new recruit’s sense of focus in collecting wallets and other material possessions, sentiments not replicated in Casper. Still mourning over Martha, Casper’s concentration to be in the robbery has been faltering, which Lil’ Mago has noted with friendly nonchalance, ever since the triumvirate boards the train discretely. However, the object of Casper’s concentration acquires a new focus when the gang leader puts his hand on one of the female passengers they are robbing. This harassment punctures Casper’s rage, and inspires him to rescue the girl. Soon, the energy of the script shifts into a narrative of escape after Casper raises his machete and lands its blade on the gang leader’s neck. Smiley’s flight from the interrupted robbery is burdened with confusion, fear, and the image of Lil’ Mago’s dead body with a leg now sliced in half on the tracks, after Casper pushes him down the boxcar rooftop they are on.

Now alone, Casper takes refuge on the train he once terrorized, and survives unsuccessful attempts against his life. Over time, the girl Casper saves – Sayra – develops feelings for him that forces her to separate with her father and uncle, to follow Casper who secretly leaves the train one morning. Casper and Sayra’s moments together deepen against Mara members in Mexico and the US now searching for Lil’ Mago’s assassin, a hunt that ends where Casper’s blood converges with the color of the setting sun on the Rio Grande River, while Sayra crosses its dark waters alone.


You can read the full-text here.

How to light the air

Image Source: Boston Globe:
Big Picture.





It comes, as passing moments, and walks through footsteps, their destinations, fragile calamities. We hurry, and take what is necessary, what we must, including what is cropped out of the image, the one where you simplified us in a gesture.

Titanic at 100 years






















The story of this ship will always float.  And no berg of any sort will threaten to sink that.  But it merely floats, and has no recognizable destination at the moment.  I'm now curious about its future stopovers, especially how the hyper-active imagination of literature and film can reshape that narrative into their own terms.  So far, the love-affair of nostalgia and curiosity in this story has been steamy.  James Cameron exposed that into a highly marketable commodity.  But love-affairs have definite life-spans.  Usually, they're short.  Although 'short', in this regard, could be highly elastic.  Let's see.  Another two centuries?  That's short in terms of light years.  The future could further exhume the remains of that ship, and raise it using technology we can only imagine today.











[The images above are linked from The Boston Globe. ]

Extensions



The flight of birds draw lines into the sky,
as they leave the edge of eaves.



Tailgating is not always intentional

@ 42nd Street & 5th Avenue (2012)
Cars disappear into someone's gestures. The longer you look into a photograph in your wallet, you see shapes, borders, and silhouettes.

Above may not be sky, but an indication of intransigence, that perhaps you're moving away from the temptation of apogees, dreams, conquests.  

In the silence of a train station, empty seats refuse to yield into metaphors, especially as hints of something exiled. Even the way we used to hold each other's hands that last time I saw you, their fingerprints were already uncoiled in what you might not want to say,

but instead became a way of looking at clouds from your window seat.

Meet Me There

Empire State Building (March 2012)
The night expands into shadows on sidewalks, in steps hurrying to catch the next train, or as they walk into a park to sit on a bench and rest. Breezes caress cheeks, gestures, or trail punctuations in a conversation. Cars converge and diverge into routes, pre-meditations, or failed plans. She keeps looking at her watch, at what its numbers tell her, their power over her expectations. There's the sky to look at. But her eyes don't look beyond the branches of trees without leaves. Her mind settles on the sound of steps, at what they are up to. She can still feel him in these nameless faces, his touch, the movement of his palms on her, where they pursue her. He takes her further in her closed eyes, into where trees hide between city-streets, between tongues that know what each cannot feel.

Sidewalk, Subway, Sandwich

The sidewalk looked wide last night. I wasn't in a hurry to go home, even though it was already midnight. Even the cars passing by looked relaxed and calm. I thought of getting coffee, but decided to catch the subway home. At the subway platform, I kept looking at the tracks, at their color, at food wrappers and other garbage sitting between them. I don't remember now how many commuters were standing near me. The place was quiet. When the train arrived, I didn't want to sit, but ended up sitting. As always, I picked a couple of points above or near the bench across me to keep looking at, an advertisement, the glass window, or anything, to avoid looking at other passengers. One time in a crowded train, I kept looking at a famous face in an ad, a news anchor. Most of the time though, I read ad captions that sound like proverbs, or sayings. At my stop, I found a well-lighted deli, and ordered a sandwich. Most of the tables there were empty, and thought of eating my order facing the door. But I decided to eat it slowly in my room, in front of my computer, and watched a indie film on DVD from the library. It's one of those stories that try to connect multiple stories together.  This one won a major award on the other side of the pond. Later, I read a short story, and tried to read two more. I think I'll read them again.

Empire State Building

 Last night, I walked through a drizzle of snow flurries on 5th Ave, from 34th to 14th and back.  I had been checking out a merchandise on the web, and wanted to see it in-person before buying it. And since I liked what I saw, I went home with it.  The streets were busy and wet outside the store, and I felt like walking around for a while.  Pizza was in my mind, or food from a truck-stand.  But I ended up getting a subway sandwich at a place near 32nd. After leaving the fast-food restaurant, I stood on the sidewalk for a while, looked around, then up.  The lights on the upper part of the Empire State Building were on, and created an effect; it looked immersed in a halo, or that its height blocked my line of sight to a full moon on a semi-cloudy sky.  I took a couple of snapshots, before heading to the Grand Central Station.  On my way there, I borrowed some videos at the Mid-Manhattan Library. Costa-Gavra's Missing - a political drama set in the 1973 coup in Chile - wasn't that bad, when I saw it later. The main characters in the story - played by Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek - are residents of the empire state.

Galatea Resurrects #17



Issue No. 17 TABLE OF CONTENTS

[N.B. You can scroll down on blog or click on highlighted names or titles to go directly to the referenced article.]

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Eileen Tabios


NEW REVIEWS
Nicholas Manning Reviews IRRESPONSIBILITY by Chris Vitiello

Patrick James Dunagan Reviews HOW PHENOMENA APPEAR TO UNFOLD by Leslie Scalapino

Allen Bramhall Reviews AT THAT by Skip Fox

T.C. Marshall Reviews ETHICS OF SLEEP by Bernadette Mayer

Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviews SELF-PORTRAIT WITH CRAYON by Allison Benis White

Laura Trantham Smith Reviews UTOPIA MINUS by Susan Briante

Moira Richards Reviews IN PARAN by Larissa Shmailo

Philip Troy Reviews THE FEELING IS ACTUAL by Paolo Javier

Eileen Tabios Engages THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT PAINTERS SHOULDN’T TALK: A GUSTONBOOK by Patrick James Dunagan

Logan Fry Reviews IN THE COMMON DREAM OF GEORGE OPPEN by Joseph Bradshaw

Eileen Tabios Engages TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE A CONVERSATION by Andrea Rexilius

Thomas Fink Reviews PARTS AND OTHER PIECES by Tom Beckett

T.C. Marshall Reviews TO LIGHT OUT by Karen Weiser and DUTIES OF AN ENGLISH FOREIGN SECRETARY by MacGregor Card

Allen Bramhall Reviews CITIZEN CAIN by Ben Friedlander

William Allegrezza Reviews
FORTY-NINE GUARANTEED WAYS TO ESCAPE DEATH by Sandy McIntosh

Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviews THERE’S THE HAND AND THERE’S THE ARID CHAIR by Tomaz Salamun

Eileen Tabios Engages MY LIFE AS A DOLL by Elizabeth Kirschner

Gabriel Lovatt Reviews THE USE OF SPEECH by Nathalie Sarraute, translated from the French by Barbara Wright

Logan Fry Reviews PORTRAIT OF COLON DASH PARENTHESIS by Jeffrey Jullich

Eileen Tabios Engages STILL: OF THE EARTH AS THE ARK WHICH DOES NOT MOVE by Matthew Cooperman

Bill Scalia Reviews THE URGE TO BELIEVE IS STRONGER THAN BELIEF ITSELF by Erin M. Bertram

Kristin Berkey-Abbot Reviews FAULKNER’S ROSARY by Sarah Vap

Micah Cavaleri Reviews KYOTOLOGIC by Anne Gorrick

Tom Beckett Engages AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY GENDER, PRURIENT OMNIBUS ANARCHIC, RESTITUTIONS FOR A NEWER BOUNTIFUL VERB, COCK-BURN, OUR BODIES . . . ARE BEAUTY INDUCERS, THE ULTERIOR EDEN, ASYMPTOTIC LOVER//THERMODYNAMIC VENTS, all by j/j hastain

j/j hastain Reviews A GOOD CUNTBOY IS HARD TO FIND by Doug Rice

Eileen Tabios Engages 60 TEXTOS by Sarah Riggs

Bill Scalia Reviews BEAT THING by David Meltzer

Logan Fry Reviews HANK by Abraham Smith

T.C. Marshall Reviews EXPLORATIONS IN NAVAJO POETRY AND POETICS by Anthony K. Webster and THE PRINCIPLE OF MEASURE IN COMPOSITION BY FIELD: PROJECTIVE VERSE II by Charles Olson, Ed. Joshue Hoeynck

Eileen Tabios Engages TEENY TINY #13, Edited by Amanda Laughtland

Allen Bramhall Reviews ANTIPHONIES: ESSAYS ON WOMEN'S EXPERIMENTAL POETRIES IN CANADA, Ed. Nate Dorward

Gabriel Lovatt Reviews VACANT LOT by Oliver Rohe, translated from the French by Laird Hunt

Eric Wayne Dickey Reviews PUNISH HONEY by Karen Leona Anderson

Eileen Tabios Engages INSIDE THE MONEY MACHINE by Minnie Bruce Pratt

Pam Brown Reviews SLY MONGOOSE by Ken Bolton

T.C. Marshall Reviews HOW LONG by Ron Padgett

Neil Leadbeater Reviews A HERON IN BUENOS AIRES by Luis Benítez

Jean Vengua Reviews THE WISDOM ANTHOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICAN BUDDHIST POETRY, Editor Andrew Schelling

Eileen Tabios Engages WAIFS AND STRAYS by Micah Ballard

T.C. Marshall Reviews THE NEW TOURISM by Harry Mathews

Guillermo Parra Reviews HOW’S THE COWS by Jess Mynes

T.C. Marshall Reviews THE WIDE ROAD by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian

John Bloomberg-Rissman Reviews THE COMMONS by Sean Bonney

Pam Brown Reviews
PERRIER FEVER by Pete Spence

Jim McCrary Engages MARROWING and THE NAME OF THIS INTERSECTION IS FROST, both by Maryrose Larkin

Tom Beckett Reviews THE NAME OF THIS INTERSECTION IS FROST by Maryrose Larkin

Patrick James Dunagan Reviews “NEITHER WIT NOR GOLD” by Ammiel Alcalay and STREET METE: VERTICAL ELEGIES 6 by Sam Truitt

Eileen Tabios Engages RADIATOR by NF Huth

Genevieve Kaplan Reviews SPEAKING OFF CENTRE by James Cummins, CORPORATE GEES (VOLUME V) by Christopher William Purdom, KITCHEN TIDBITS by Amanda Laughtland, FROM HERE by Zoë Skoulding with images by Simonetta Moro, and TWO HATS APPEAR WHEN APPLAUDED: AN IMPROVISATION by Raymond Farr

L.S. Bassen Reviews IT MIGHT TURN OUT WE ARE REAL by Susan Scarlata

rob mclennan Reviews THREE NOVELS by Elizabeth Robinson

Patrick James Dunagan & Ava Koohbor Review THE TELLER OF TALES: STORIES FROM FERODWSI’S SHAHNAHMEN, Translated by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Tom Hibbard Reviews SELECTED POEMS by Nick Demske, A MYSTICAL THEOLOGY OF THE LIMBIC FISSURE by Peter O’Leary, HOSTILE WITNESS by Garin Cycholl, UNABLE TO FULLY CALIFORNIA by Larry Sawyer, AIN’T GOT ALL NIGHT by Buck Downs, and ANSWER by Mark DuCharme

Jeff Harrison Engages THE DANGEROUS ISLANDS (A NOVEL) by Séamas Cain

Eileen Tabios Engages ALIENS: AN ISLAND by Uljana Wolf, Trans. from the German by Monika Zobel

Kristin Berkey-Abbot Reviews LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN: INTERVIEWS ON SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY AND OTHER WORKS by Barbara Henning

G. Justin Hulog Reviews ARCHIPELAGO DUST by Karen Llagas

Allen Bramhall Reviews FRAGILE REPLACEMENTS by William Allegrezza

Eileen Tabios Engages RED WALLS by James Tolan

Juliet Cook Reviews COMPENDIUM by Kristina Marie Darling

Bill Scalia Reviews WHAT THE RAVEN SAID by Robert Alexander

Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviews
SEE HOW WE ALMOST FLY by Alison Luterman

Sunnylynn Thibodeaux Reviews THE INCOMPOSSIBLE by Carrie Hunter

John Bloomberg-Rissman Reviews 908-1078 and THE PERSIANS BY AESCHYLUS, both by Brandon Brown

Benjamin Winkler Reviews WE IN MY TRANS by j/j hastain

Mary Kasimor Reviews T&U&/LASH YOUR NIPPLES TO A POST/HISTORY IS GORGEOUS by Jared Schickling

Jeff Harrison Engages T&U& LASH YOUR NIPPLES TO A POST HISTORY IS GORGEOUS by Jared Schickling

rob mclennan Reviews APOLLINAIRE’S SPEECH TO THE WAR MEDIC by Jake Kennedy

Megan Burns Reviews LUCKY by Mairéad Byrne and A REDUCTION by Jimmy Lo

Paul Lai Engages KĒROTAKIS : by Janice Lee

Patrick James Dunagan Reviews CLEARVIEW by Ted Greenwald and THE PUBLIC GARDENS: POEMS AND HISTORY by Linda Norton


John Bloomberg-Rissman Reviews KAZOO DREAMBOATS OR, ON WHAT THERE IS by J.H. Prynne

Gregory W. Randall Reviews THE HOMELESSNESS OF SELF by Susan Terris

Jim McCrary Reviews MY COMMON HEART by Anne Boyer and ISSUE 8, Newsletter from James Yeary

Megan Burns Reviews A TOAST IN THE HOUSE OF FRIENDS by Akilah Oliver

Eileen Tabios Engages INFO RATION by Stan Apps

Bill Scalia Reviews THE MORNING NEWS IS EXCITING by Don Mee Choi

Micah Cavaleri Reviews ACOUSTIC EXPERIENCE by Noah Eli Gordon

Jim McCrary Reviews COLLECTION by Megan Kaminski, MANTIC SEMANTIC by A.L. Nielsen, LVNGinTONGUES by G. E. Schwartz, and PO DOOM by jim mccrary

Eileen Tabios Engages BLUE COLLAR POET by G. Emil Reutter

Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviews IF NOT METAMORPHIC by Brenda Iljima

Eileen Tabios Engages THE ULTERIOR EDEN: A SERIES OF GENUFLECTIONS, RUMINATIONS AND GYROSCOPES by j/j hastain


INTERVIEW
Tom Beckett Interviews NF Huth


FEATURE ARTICLE
“Make a Wish…and Blow out the Candles: An Explication of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie by Nicholas T. Spatafora


THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS
Sunnylyn Thibodeaux


FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE
Paul Lai Reviews AUTOMATON BIOGRAPHIES by Larissa Lai


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