Museum of the americast ny
Museum of the Americas is a really admirable endeavor because it aspires to be than what books usually are As Roxane Gay says in her blurb on the back cover this collection blurs genre in some really interesting ways Given the goings on of the world this poetry is especially timely Mart nez is searching for something than just poetry or prose here a mix of art and instruction the study of history with some music played behind it ekphrastic investigations of the light and heavy elements that photographs carry within themselves Honestly I am not always the biggest fan of Mart nez s poetry He has it but I think that he does himself a disservice by so often restricting poetic line length and playing with spacing on the page At times the brevity really gets me this pivot point so carcass carved POTUS XLV and The man s arms are amputated by luminance Executing Bandits in Mexico Poems like Instructions for Identifying Illegal Immigrants and Lord Spanglish Me have their moments but the line breaks sometimes seemed out of place and the unusual spacing became distracting One Grave for 63 Men after the Battle and the closing and heartbreaking eulogy Where Love is Ground to Wheat are examples of the good things that come from Mart nez stretching things out into longer lines. Book Museum of the americast What does really draw me to this book is how Mart nez spices up didactic pieces If there is life it is public domain Triple Execution in Mexico draws a really interesting line from now to 100 years ago The two parallel voices speaking in Brown I see you Brown I Don t make for an interesting dialogue The series Casta Paintings an Erotics of Negation and Museum of the Americas are telling historical tales of identity formation but the poetic prose puts a spring in their steps Sometimes the didactic does seem to take over the untitled piece on p 42 is like a conclusion at the end of an academic article and the untitled piece on p 16 seems like it could have done without the closing line The cast kinky historiographical exhibitionism Sextastic Sometimes it felt like he didn t trust me to connect the dots on my own. Museum of the americasync All that being said I can t think of another book like this Mart nez is wrestling with heady concepts and his hands extend into the outer reaches to teach us about the historical roots of contemporary prejudices to remind us that the US Mexico border has long been a site of physical and political violence He also reminds us by focusing on themes of family and love that we can draw strength from one another instead of venom 0143133446 This is an interesting blend of poetry and nonfiction that tackles imperialism in the Mexican American dynamic The poetry is spliced with real neurological studies on racial identification primary sources from the early 1840s 1900s when America was at least obviously exploitative and racist The poetry contains language that I could never hope of attaining It s good But I got much out of the nonfiction But it was fun to alternately learn some history and also marvel at some linguistic acrobatics. Museum of the americas madrid Recommended for poets with a proclivity toward history 0143133446 Fave Brown I See You Brown I Don t 0143133446 As with Claudia Rankine s Citizen I admire the ambition behind Museum of the Americas than I like the poetry Martinez is very very smart about the contours of Latinx experience in a frequently hostile hemisphere dominated by Anglo simplifications and mis representations His sequence Casta Paintings an Erotics of Negation Brown I See You Brown I Don t and the title poem all address the contradictions of life on linguistic and racial ethnic national borders with clarity and insight Problem for me is that the book feels a bit prose y with only a smattering of passages that move beyond the paraphraseable content So the three stars is a reflection of my aesthetic than the quality of the work Glad I read it probably won t revisit 0143133446 Hmm I didn t enjoy this as much as I thought I would I think it was a stylistic thing than anything but I absolutely loved the nuanced exploration of Mexican immigration and the body. Book Museum of the americas cardroom Some favorites Instructions for Identifying Illegal Immigrants Lord Spanglish Me Bodies of 3 Men Lying as They Fell After Being Executed On the Naturalization of Alien Immigrants and Skin Maps 0143133446 A Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project J Michael Martinez received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his first book Heredities In the Garden of the Bridehouse is available from the University of Arizona Press His third collection Museum of the Americas was selected for the National Poetry Series by Cornelius Eady and is published by Penguin Press J Michaels next work Tarta Americana will be published by Penguin September of 2023 An Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University he teaches in their MFA program and lives in San Jose About his work Herrera wrote it breaks away from four decades of inquiry into cultural identity Martinezs exhil A Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project J Michael Martinez received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his first book Heredities In the Garden of the Bridehouse is available from the University of Arizona Press His third collection Museum of the Americas was selected for the National Poetry Series by Cornelius Eady and is published by Penguin Press J Michael s next work Tarta Americana will be published by Penguin September of 2023 An Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University he teaches in their MFA program and lives in San Jose About his work Herrera wrote it breaks away from four decades of inquiry into cultural identity Martinez s exhilarating descent into the unspoken lit by metaphysical investigations physiological charts and meta translations of Hern n Cort s s accounts of his conquests gives voice to a dismembered continental body buried long ago This body though flayed and fractured rises and sings site_link The poems in J Michael Martinez s third collection of poetry circle around how the perceived body comes to be coded with the trans historical consequences of an imperial narrative Engaging beautiful and otherworldly Mexican casta paintings morbid photographic postcards depicting the bodies of dead Mexicans the strange journey of the wood and cork leg of General Santa Anna and Martinez s own family lineage Museum of the Americas gives accounts of migrant bodies caught beneath and fashioned under a racializing aesthetic gaze Martinez questions how knowledge of the body is organized through visual perception of that body hypothesizing the corporeal as a repository of the human situation a nexus of culture Museum of the Americas poetic revives and repurposes the persecuted ethnic body from the appropriations that render it an art object and therefore diposable Museum of the Americas Penguin Poets This poetry collection while on the NBA longlist did not make the shortlist There are some excellent poems here but a few that played with form were not as good to me Many of the poems however give a strong message about the Mexican American experience and the treatment of indigenous peoples in US history 3. Museum of the americast 32 5 0143133446 My review for the New York Times Book Review the European Renaissance men of wealth and learning put together cabinets of curiosities The contents consisted of objects whose categorical boundaries in natural history zoology archaeology ethnography geology and so on were not yet firmly established Also known as wunderkammers or wonder rooms these motley and often scientifically and culturally dubious collections served as the forerunners of what today we know as museums Like museums these compilations were hardly neutral In the words of the art professor Francesca Fiorani these costly and hard to acquire assemblages conveyed symbolically the patron s control of the world through its indoor microscopic reproduction A great many of these cabinets contained holdings from the so called New World a place that the assemblers certainly had an interest in controlling J Michael Martinez s third book Museum of the Americas won the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition but its contents are unapologetically excitingly hybrid including prose lineated verse vintage postcards and black and white photographs Thus perhaps this marvelous argumentative and curiosity provoking book is itself best thought of as a kind of corrective cabinet of wonders one whose portraits and specimens complicate the dominant narratives of imperial conquest and control. Museum of the americast ny Like a curator overseeing a show Martinez gives readers the sense that each item he incorporates has been carefully selected and thoughtfully juxtaposed with the ones around it In an eight page poem essay called Casta Paintings an Erotics of Negation he guides the reader on a tour of this art form which first appeared in the 1700s when mostly anonymous artists began depicting mixed race individuals castas in Spain s American colonies With the authority of a docent he comments on the calligraphic script underscoring each panel noting that this man designates the Spanish the woman is the mulatta and their child carrying a basket of fruit Nace torna atras a Return backwards is Born and observes how Language oil combine to boundary the body into race With the voice of a teacher he points out how In the 18th into the 19th century casta paintings were employed in New Spain to validate racial identity whiteness in the legislation of land acquisition in determining civil rights And with the critical eye of a keen comedian he remarks The cast kinky historiographical exhibitionism Sextastic Martinez s approach is as brainy as it is entertaining as political as it is personal Throughout his heady exploration of the white gaze colonial trauma and Mexican migration the author audaciously asserts his well read academic prowess not afraid for instance to make the reader reach to understand an opening epigraph from Walter Benjamin about the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified primordial landscape But so too is the book intensely embodied and intimate its first section preceded with a photograph of Martinez s parents Jerry and Mary at their wedding in 1974 In a later poem about this image titled Family Photo Slicing Their Wedding Cake he writes with obvious admiration of their youthful beauty and love They were the story time she the elven smilewearing a dove falling to frosting the curtains amber the parturientfather shape blurred inside the foreground auburn bright in snowedshirt rufflesUnlike many actual museums Museum of the Americas wisely makes no pretense of being objective Martinez subjects his chosen artifacts to pointed interrogations In a series of pieces responding to the work of Walter H Horne a photographer for the Mexican War Photo Postcard Company during the era of the Mexican revolutionary general Francisco Pancho Villa Martinez meditates on the white documentarian s practice of mass producing and selling graphic images of executions and war effectively bringing about a vast photographic immigration of nameless Mexicans In The Executioner s Palisade he writes Stamped for addressthe paper carcass sealsword to imagepostscript to passage the Mexican all virgin talismanwhen mailed in a sepia ruinwhose only wound is postage the distance the body travelsto know another. Epub museum of the americas pdf Martinez repeatedly calls the very impulse to display into question from the touring around of the supposed head of the putative criminal Joaquin Murrieta to P T Barnum s showing off of the prosthetic leg of General Santa Anna at his American Museum in New York City on the corner of Broadway and Ann Street to the document of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo In doing so he reveals that even though display ostensibly means to make a prominent exhibition of something where it can be easily seen many such public presentations have problematically exploitive semi hidden agendas Even such commonly used labels as explorer familiar to museum patrons from wall texts and audio guides conceal countless unnamed pluralities and alternative points of view. Museum of the americas book uk In a piece called Of Maximo and Bartola the Aztec Children illuminating one especially egregious erasure Martinez writes of the specious explorer John Lloyd Stephens whose gratuitous travel narratives had established him in the popular imagination of the mid 19th century as having discovered the lost Mayan culture Stephens even went so far as to use the appropriative pseudonym Pedro Velasquez to authenticate his fiction linguistically Martinez s power as a memoirist is considerable as well In one of the book s most unforgettable pieces Brown I See You Brown I Don t he blends his own experience of being identified racially by different people in different contexts both threatening and non with the psychological phenomenon of the Other Race Effect or ORE the widely studied tendency of humans to most easily recognize the faces of the race with which they are most familiar. Museum of the americast vs The root word of museum originally meant seat or shrine of the Muses its use in the sense of a building to display objects was first recorded in the 1680s In this thrillingly genre blurring book Martinez evokes both senses of that etymology The poetic delights suggest the presence of the Muses and the items upon which he encourages the reader to focus produce a fresh and necessary gallery that rivets both the interest and the intellect 0143133446 This is a fascinating layered collection of poetry that blurs genre in some really interesting ways Martinez offers as the title suggests a museum of the Americas and especially engages with Mexican migration and its effect on the body Given the goings on of the world this poetry is especially timely Real standouts include Skin Maps On the Naturalization of Alien Immigrants and Bodies of 3 Men Lying As They Fell After Being Executed that one is stunning But really every poem or prose in this book offers something beautiful or haunting or illuminating It is didactic but not in a heavy handed way Every thought every word every image is precisely rendered Outstanding stuff here Check it out 0143133446 Excerpt from the back cover Engaging beautiful and otherworldly Mexican casta paintings morbid photographic postcards depicting the bodies of dead Mexicans the strange journey of the wood and cork leg of General Santa Anna and Martinez s own family lineage Museum of the Americas gives accounts of migrant bodies caught beneath and fashioned under a radicalizing aesthetic gaze. Museum of the americast pads J Michael Martinez has created a book that is quite unlike others that I have read and I was fascinated and haunted by the beauty of the poetry which transported me to another time and place Museum of the Americas is divided into four parts My favorite poemsFrom part I LORD SPANGLISH MEFrom part II YNCINERACION DE CADAVERES EN BALBUENA Postcard No 35EXECUTING BANDITS IN MEXICO A Postcard by Walter H HorneFrom part IV THE WAKE OF MARIA DE JESUS MARTINEZWHERE LOVE IS GROUND TO WHEAT for Maria Jesus MartinezYou were laid among lilies the thin skin of the leaf the interval oak. Museum of the americasz zzoomm internet Beside the casket I collect my tearsbefore they fall so I may look at youso the white down of children may fill the empty beaches again so the bees may store the honeywhere mercy prepares the mapof the forgiven within us. Museum of the americasync We are too many skieswe who cling to the visible the bread of my routines now absent of you are abundant with you 0143133446 Yet another case of maybe I would ve liked this better if I could actually understand the writing Poetry is really hit or miss for me I think the subject matter of this book is very important but the meaning was lost because I couldn t comprehend what the author was actually trying to say 75% of the time I am simply not smart enough for books like this 0143133446 
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