{"id":53705,"date":"2023-08-30T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-08-30T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dvan.org\/?p=53705"},"modified":"2023-11-22T11:53:20","modified_gmt":"2023-11-22T19:53:20","slug":"book-review-tender-machines-by-j-mae-barizo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dvan.org\/2023\/08\/book-review-tender-machines-by-j-mae-barizo\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Tender Machines by J. Mae Barizo"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Tender Machines, <\/em>J. Mae Barizo\u2019s second full-length poetry collection, begins with the epigraph from Sylvia Plath\u2019s Bell Jar <\/em>that tenderness is what women see in other women that they don\u2019t see in a man. This book is for women, in all their roles and royalties\u2014daughter, friend, lover, mother, great-grandmother. As a poet, librettist, and musician, Barizo creates lyrical urgency in each of her poems. The poems are akin to sheet music, telling the reader how they are supposed to be read and what symphonies they will evoke. The resulting experience is one of transcendence, euphoria, and calmness, all at once.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

At the book launch hosted by The New School, Barizo described the sonnet as an attempt to escape from a cage. There is a small section in the book titled, small essays on disappearances, <\/em>written largely in a poem format. I was not concerned with why the poet chose to call them essays (from the French, essai, <\/em>meaning trial or attempt), but how each poem within that section tangoes with the sonnet. Most of the poems in that section are twelve, thirteen, or sixteen lines, always skirting around the sonnet, as if teasing it. An attempt at disappearing. An attempt at reaching the sonnet. An attempt at escaping from the cage.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The book is a dynamic, tender reckoning with what it means to honor the ancestors we come from and the children and \u201cnot-children\u201d we will leave behind us. In \u201cPleistocene,\u201d Barizo writes, \u201cWhat little deaths we leave \/ our children, our not-children.\u201d One of the beginning poems, \u201cFugue on the Maiden Name of my Mother,\u201d explores the complex relationship between the colonizer and his colonial subject. Barizo is curious about the Spanish surname of her mother, Miraflores,<\/em> and finds out it was given by the colonizer to her great-great-grandmother because she was his favorite concubine. The ending line of the poem is as jarring as the circumstance, \u201cmy oppressor my settler my colonizer, my love.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In the poem that comes immediately after that, \u201cWoman Contemplates her Complicity,\u201d Barizo sets her Filipino identity against\/alongside a white backdrop, \u201cI\u2019m complicit, with my manicure \/ and expertly-dyed hair\u201d and interrogates what side she is on. She ends the poem with \u201cMy skin, my \/ skin beneath the sun of my ancestors darkens so very easily.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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J. Mae Barizo<\/a><\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Barizo is also a devout student of the environment and spatiality\u2014her poems embody their set landscape masterfully. Tender Machines <\/em>is largely set in New York between two disasters: 9\/11 and our current pandemic. In one of the poems in small essays on disappearance, <\/em>she writes:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

All \/ my life sacrificed to the arrogance of cities, \/ their empires of skin.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Another poem she begins with:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Before the towers fell
I loved for a time, carried
it around like a pacemaker
sing singing the concrete river\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Barizo evokes the city\u2019s landscapes such as Madison Ave and Zabriskie Point in various forms and fictions\u2014letting desire and tenderness act as the conductor of the entire orchestra that is this collection. We depart from, and return to, the same landscapes, albeit with changes in the speaker, in the landscape, in our own selves.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The music in Tender Machines <\/em>is bursting at the seams. Reading these poems evoked a similar feeling as listening to Urdu and Farsi ghazals from my childhood\u2014composed in set melodies, called raag, <\/em>a rich poetic tradition in South Asia. One of the charming qualities of a ghazal is its use of repetition to evoke lyricism\u2014in the form of radif, <\/em>which is the refrain at the end of every second hemistich, or takrar, <\/em>which is the repetition of certain words or phrases within a couplet. In \u201cLux Aeterna,\u201d a sonnet which appears through the later half of the book, Barizo writes:\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Tell me\u00a0
that I remember it correctly, that the light
will lick and lick the damage clean. That it is not\u00a0
ruin already. Tell me.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

All but one poem in Tender Machines <\/em>spill over to the next page. The brevity of the poems, precision of its thought and language, make them more appealing to be memorized, performed orally, sung. In \u201cAndante Cantabile,\u201d one of the more shorter poems in the collection, Barizo writes:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It is the autumn of my fortieth year
My follicles are turning dry
See the muteness of my hands?
A love I once gave away
Haunts me everywhere.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Reading this book is like floating, like enjoying an exquisite\u2014though ephemeral\u2014orchestra. I laughed, I wept, I gasped. One does not need a playlist along with this book\u2014it acts as one in itself.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

\r\n\r\n\r\n

Tender Machines<\/a><\/em>
by J. Mae Barizo
Tupelo Press, $21.95<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Javeria Hasnain<\/strong> is a Pakistani poet and writer, and a Fulbright scholar at The New School, NY, pursuing an MFA in Poetry. Her poems and prose have appeared\/are forthcoming in\u00a0Poet Lore, Isele, The Mascara Review, The Margins,\u00a0<\/em>and elsewhere. She is a runner-up for the 2022 The Bird in Your Hands prize and has received a nomination for Best Microfiction 2023. She is an alum of the IWP’s\u00a0Summer Institute at the University of Iowa.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tender Machines, J. Mae Barizo\u2019s second full-length poetry collection, begins with the epigraph from Sylvia Plath\u2019s Bell Jar that tenderness is what women see in other women that they don\u2019t see in a man. This book is for women, in all their roles and royalties\u2014daughter, friend, lover, mother, great-grandmother.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":54274,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_vp_format_video_url":"","_vp_image_focal_point":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[2169,2170],"yoast_head":"\nBook Review: Tender Machines by J. 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