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The Book of What Remains
With his sixth collection, Sáenz bursts forth as a major American poet, one with an oracular ear to the ground for what moves people today and also an eye for the larger questions in which today’s concerns are embedded. Set in the Southwest, especially near Sáenz’s home in El Paso, the poems descend from the spiritual tradition of the desert fathers, who sought contact with divinity in arid and dangerous places. But where those ancient monks found themselves and God, Sáenz finds people braving the terrain in search of a better life, images of a postapocalyptic world, and even modernist poets in bizarre juxtaposition to cacti. Most of the poems are long and long-lined, which enhances their oral character. Reading him is like listening to a gifted storyteller, for whom every digression is a path to meaning. And like listening to truth, for his motivations are less purely literary than spiritual and moral, as his subjects are civil and environmental rights, social justice, and the gift of kindness. “As Mexicans would have it: / Cada cabeza es un mundo. / Every single mind / constitutes a world— / an ecosystem.” Sáenz seamlessly joins humanity and the natural world through compassion for both.
Starred Review, Booklist
Prologue
A man is being interviewed on the radio. He has written a book, Proust
Was a Neuroscientist. I do not like Proust and so I am not really listening—
but then something happens and I am listening. The man begins talking
about the nature of memories and how they change. They change because
we change them. He says this is a fact. I have no reason to believe him.
Neither do I have any reason to doubt him. He has written this book so
he must be some kind of expert. According to this expert, every time we
visit a memory, we change it. If we are to believe the findings of this
erudite, disciplined, and articulate scholar, then we must conclude that
over the course of our lives, we completely change every memory we visit.
The final result is that there is no purity to remembering. Memories, he
says, are beautifully sincere. They also lie. The interviewer’s response
interests me. “That’s so sad,” she says. I do not share her sense of sadness.
The fact that our memories may be half-truths, doesn’t break my heart.
There is a litany of sadder things—much, much sadder things—that have
broken my heart. There is no need to be specific. Is there?
But now that I am on the subject of memories, I’m thinking that even if
memories lie, even if no memory is true, despite all of that, there must be
some truth that remains—even within the lie. And that truth is what I’m
hanging on to. That is all that remains.
From The Book of What Remains
Copyright © Benjamin Alire Sáenz, 2010.
Click here to order from Amazon.
Now out in paperback from Simon & Schuster:
From He Forgot to Say Goodbye
Him
Sometimes I think of him. And when I do, I start to draw a picture. Not a real picture. I’m not an artist, not even close. I just draw this picture in my head.
Of him.
My dad.
It’s easier for me to draw a picture of what he looks like than to imagine his voice. I mean, I don’t know what he would sound like. He would use a lot of Spanish. But his voice, I don’t know, I just don’t know what words he’d use. He’d be angry, but, that would just make him normal. A lot of fathers are like that—especially fathers who’ve gone away. I think of their anger as a wind. And that wind took them away. From me. And all the others like me.
Copyright © Benjamin Alire Sáenz, 2008.
Click here to order from Amazon.
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