After finishing Machete by Tomas Q. Morin, I struggled to collect my thoughts: this is not usually the case for me as an avid reader, as I would usually know how and what I feel even while reading. Yet, I was uncertain of what to make of this collection and of Morin himself because there is so much packed into Machete that it became discombobulating at times. But was this bewildering and perplexing reading experience intentional?
A quick Google search led me to some critical context of who Morin is as a poet. Prior to writing Machete, Morin translated Pablo Neruda’s magnum opus The Heights of Machu Picchu. For those who are unfamiliar with Neruda’s work, the epic poem portrays separate phases of the unnamed narrator’s journey. After traveling around the country, he climbs to and views the lost Inca City of Machu Picchu. He contemplates the ancients who built the city and concludes that their lives were as meaningless and also as noble as those of his contemporaries. While Machete is neither similar nor attempts to emulate Neruda, readers can find traces of Neruda in Morin’s writing not only in his craft but in the thematic ideas of loneliness and the transient nature of humanity.
To start, Morin writes with an excellent and ornate style that is purposefully ambiguous. In his intentional ambiguity, Morin successfully constructs multiple interpretations and meanings to his poems. A poem titled New Year's Eve epitomizes this, beginning with the images that the title alone can conjure: those of parties, celebrations, and festivity. However, the speaker deviates from this expectation, instead delineating the racial segregation of America by visually representing racial geographies across the country as “dots.” The White population dominates the map—compared to the minuscule space occupied by non-White communities—and is perennially expanding, an acknowledgment of the bitter history of manifest destiny. How this is relevant to "New Year's Eve" is not explicit, but there are unequivocally dense themes present in this poem. Morin encourages his audience to explore the subtext and develop their own interpretations while reading between the lines.
After reading New Year’s Eve, one expects Morin to not shy away from tackling uncomfortable topics and issues. In Extraordinary Rendition, the speaker references drone warfare in the Middle East, elucidating the hallowing effects of neocolonialism. Through this poem, Morin speaks to the recent events in Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban. The title refers to the practice by the CIA or other United States-backed intelligence and defense programs of kidnapping people (usually refugees or “illegal combatants” from the Middle East during the War on Terror) and sending them to countries with high risk of torture. However, Morin twists this interpretation and cleverly adds another layer about an imagined "extraordinary rendition" of Billie Holiday's music, something so pleasant that can never reach the citizens, specifically the children of Palestine. Another poem, Whiteface, takes structure as a numbered list, presenting successive questions stemming from the single moment a Black person is pulled over by the cops. In this poem, Morin highlights the absurdity and the devastating impact of this unfortunately all-too-familiar experience.
As a reader, I can only wish there were more poems like those. As I read throughout the entire collection, I found its main flaw to be the lack of argumentative cohesion. Morin invites readers to his page with his introduction of compelling topics, which I then felt were not fully realized. This pattern resulted in a few poems seeming just a bit too bizarre and out-of-place to be included in Morin’s collection. In Vallejo, Morin describes the ongoing pandemic, wherein people have become unreasonably aloof or xenophobic. The speaker yearns for more "human poems" and his desire to turn back time, much like Superman did in the 1978 film. While this poem is sincere and heartfelt, I was left wondering: "how does this fit into his overall collection?"
Yet another strikingly out-of-place poem is Duct Tape, which is written from the perspective of a roll of duct tape. The tape endures wear and tear, but it also witnesses the comings and goings of humans and the blossoming and deteriorating relationships. It is surely a clever poem that reflects on the brevity of human life as opposed to something as inorganic as a duct tape, but then again, I think it did not fit in well with the rest of the poems. This is not to say that the poems are poorly written (in fact they were very exceptional), but that the fresh perspectives tend to detract from, rather than supplement, the collection’s tone and themes. Perhaps if Morin had established a stronger connection to the themes, his messages would not be so easily lost in his words.
To me, the poem that best balances Morin's risk-taking writing approach and the thematic ideas is Sartana and Machete in Outer Space. As the title suggests, it contains elements of science-fiction, which might puzzle some readers. It even pays homage to pop-culture icons Jessica Alba and Danny Trejo (a fun nod to the "Machete" character he plays). What appears to be a refreshing break from the heavy thematic ideas, however, quickly subverts the reader's expectations: it becomes a distressing tale of refugees, immigrants, and the atrocious conditions they face in 'outer space planets.'
Perhaps the connecting thread that binds these poems together is the idea of what it means to be a human (or more specifically, a person from a marginalized community), living in the past or present. Yet, I felt the scope of this overarching theme is too broad, so the lack of focus undermines the power of his poems especially since the poems seem so disparate. Still, Machete is very well-written and is worth checking out. It may not reach "The Heights" of Machu Picchu, but it is still an ambitious modern work that Neruda would likely be proud of.
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