I finally got around to reading Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s poetry collection Losing Miami (The Accomplices, 2019). The title has a double meaning: the author/speaker has moved away from their hometown (and you can’t go home again), and in the meantime, the hometown is being lost to the waves. The book begins:
start with sinking: I was raised in a city that could be swallowed by the sea within the next century start there It’s not a book about climate change — at least not in any simple or straightforward sense. But the poems are about a city where you can never get away from the issue of sea-level rise (hence the City of Miami has a Climate Resilience Committee). In the prose poem “I Do Not,” the speaker is told by a gorgeous straight man that it is all about taxes. That we can make money differently. That the gentrifiers are buying higher altitude property and pushing the poor to lower altitude neighborhoods where houses will be lost first. It’s funny to think of “altitude” in a place as flat as Miami — but that’s the very reason Miamians have to think about altitude. And it’s not like storm surge is the only Miami problem the book presents: there’s overloaded sewer lines and leaking septic tanks, for instance. There’s being gay and cubano in a culture that doesn’t like either. And there’s all the ordinary bullshit of life that poets write about. Still, weaving between the traffic jams and personal insecurities, climate chaos keeps showing up: “Don’t tell me that it’s literally all my actions causing this, even if it is. I can’t figure that one. Instead, be honest and tell me it is ones with larger influence. Ribcages of corporations. Day to day in a government.” This is a bilingual mixed-genre book. It splices prose and verse, lyric meditation and nonfiction thinking, as in this section of the serial poem “Losing Miami”: If I could prove you wrong phoenix of sand “vertical living” I aspire to joystick control of a crab walking forwards drowning on the turnpike leaping off the turnpike Is this the miracle of the inventing mind? Really? Island nations and coastal cities close to drowning in the ocean? As a species we can invent anything and have, do anything and have, but the whole time, the thousands of years we’ve done it, this is its byproduct? I am trying not to show it but I am enraged. I feel cheated by consequences I cannot fully comprehend. I feel guilty enough in causation but unequipped to remedy my/our actions. This is a deep and slow rage, one that I can’t fully feel at the precise moment, but one that flatly spreads across the present and possibility. The prose bit doesn’t necessarily say anything that hasn’t been said before, but it says it well — and it’s so rare to hear a poet say as much, in as many words, that reading the book is very refreshing, if depressing. The poems’ mercurial zigs and zags from image to thought, along with the word play — in both Spanish and English and between Spanish and English — never let the poems become overly saturnine. They feel like what I feel like Miami is like. Indeed, Ojeda-Sagué can get pretty funny: I hum, a category 1 is not enough to lift the ocean and pour it into my pants at least not here, but it can evaluate a coast, and set it aside, or it can destroy New York, but even I can destroy New York The sang-froid of the hurricane veteran can quickly devolve to ennui — and ennui masks a certain restlessness: I wish a hurricane were more dramatic, came with sandbags seething in spin, hit citizens with sandbags to displace them . . . . . . the Godzilla we always wanted, thought would come sooner If the Big One is always coming, will you even notice when it comes? This is the tension that swirls over the book. Things get worse, little by little; whole generations grow up with climate crisis and don’t know anything else. And we can’t read what’s right in front of our faces, because we can’t imagine what it portends: water is rising that’s the obvious but the hardest is to concede treasures to an imaginary coastline Those are fake pearls that were his eyes? Or real pearls and fake eyes. The Big Take-Home from Losing Miami is that the issues we have with climate change are not that far removed with the issues we have with everything else — indeed, proceed from and are enmeshed in the “everything else” of our lives. And that’s a valuable insight, even if you don’t know what elevation you’re at.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |