No One Says ‘Kin’ Anymore
by Bianca Diaz
Spring Garden Press, 24 pp., $20.00

In only a chapbook-size collection of poems, Bianca Diaz is able to capture the essences of myth and legend as her poems explore ancestry, tradition, and memory with a refreshingly simplistic diction that contributes to a tone that conjures oral tradition.

The opening poem, “Elegy” is an invocation with its calming repetition of the phrase “Long live,” followed by descriptions that become specific as the poem goes on:

… Once, a boy crouched in wet grass loaded with baby frogs and he wondered how many he’d stepped on on the way to this spot. Long live his thrill.

Indeed, ‘Elegy’ is an appropriate poem to begin with because it sets the reader up for how Diaz will continue to describe places and events with a sense of wonderment. For there is a thrill in personal exploration that directly correlates to the thrill of travel.

Wonderment is found in the poem, ‘In Cuba, Everything is Implied,’ where the country is described as having ‘the most available light’ while ‘seawalls inch their way skyward.’ There certainly are elements of magical realism in these poems, giving the reader a sense of awe as Diaz presents a culture with originality. For example, it not too often that readers come across a poem like ‘Ghost,’ which tells a sort of seafarer tale about a man’s body becoming something supernatural:

He slipped into the sea like an offering to a nautical god. It’s not so hard to imagine a pod of dolphins crying seven miles east. His three children would be dining on yellow rice and squash. He had known the oldest one’s eyes were green but he held up the child’s face and checked anyway the day before he left.

This poem furthers the idea of oral tradition: it uses strong aesthetic elements to tell the story of a man who is already dead when the poem begins. There is so much mystery (Who are the “five men” who threw him overboard? Why was he on the ship in the first place? Questions I am happy to see unanswered) that propels the reader to read on, intrigued. It is the mundane (eating yellow rice and squash) combined with the extraordinary (slipping into the sea like a god) that makes the compelling dichotomy work for the poem. This poem reiterates the fact that legend changes from generation to generation and memory has a funny way of getting fuzzy over time. The voice of the poem is sure of itself---it is a storyteller’s voice, but it is no historian, and the reader can imagine the story found within this poem to be told by an eccentric great-aunt to a small child who has so many questions, but will not ask them because he is so captivated by what he hears. This voice, found throughout the chapbook, makes for some highly imaginative and successful poems.

One of the many symbols that are awash throughout the poems in Diaz’s chapbook is the sea, which plays an important role in her poems that explore family and ancestry. These poems, I believe, are the strongest in the chapbook, for they are carried by a subtle emotion while still keeping the wondrous tone. In “No One Says Kin Anymore,” Diaz expertly starts in a universal way, bringing the readers in (“Mothers sometimes forget where they come from”) before moving into a description of her own mother, who has memories, habits, and associations different from the speaker:

…If I say seagull, my mother sees a severed wing and a bird panicked in disbelief---sees an assemblage in a greasy parking lot, everyone circling the bird, offering bread, gauze, prayer.

Certainly, this is a rather shocking portrait of a seagull, and it taps into the mother’s state of mind in an effective way. Why does the speaker’s mother have this association? What has she experienced before in the past to affect her subconscious in this way? In one stanza, we learn so much about the mother as we become aware of her past and present thoughts.

The poem then effortlessly moves back to the plural in the last stanza, bringing back the mythic themes occurring throughout: “If mothers abandoned air and learned to braid kelp, they / could be mermaids.” Bringing back the notion of flight, or in this case, the seagull’s loss of flight, ends on the idea of rebirth into a fantastical state of being.

Ancestry is fully explored again in “Finds,” a fascinating poem in which the speaker finds herself observing her grandmother’s dream:

I walked into my grandmother’s dream, it’s not uncommon, and saw her tearing envelopes open with a trowel. She reached into them and grabbed fistfuls of pollen.

The beginning of this poems has the feel of an Emily Dickinson poem: in the span of a line and a half, the speaker does something astonishing, but then follows it by saying it is “not uncommon,” as if we should not be reading this with our mouths hanging open. Later in the poem, we hear about her grandmother’s last trip to Cuba - her homeland - which is not exactly described as a paradise. However, the “pollen” in the grandmother’s dream seems to directly relate back to the idea of country and earth, as the grandmother attempts to find what has been stored in her memory—the organic beauty of her homeland that the speaker may have not known about if she had not walked into her grandmother’s dream and observed her take on things. For this seems to be the central idea that the chapbook explores: as we travel throughout our lives, our associations of things change but will always remain, in some aspect or another, different from others. Therefore, when we are discussing individual versus family, how do we reconcile these different memories, these associations? As the sea fluctuates and is affected by outside forces, it nevertheless remains essentially the same, just like our ancestry, traditions, and memories holding us all together remain, in its skeleton, familiar. To guide the reader to that sort of introspection through visionary ideas, lyrical language, and concise imagery (indeed, the reader feel like she is hearing these stories from a very creative and believable uncle) makes the chapbook, for me, a highly-satisfying read that asks to be remembered and to be visited again.

STEFANIE SILVA is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she earned an MFA in Creative Writing and served as Poetry Editor of The Greensboro Review.