Tripas
- Sep 16, 2024
- 1 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
★★★☆☆
I stumbled across Brandon Som’s Tripas while browsing the new books section at the library. I was not familiar with Som, but, as a designer, the book’s cover was intriguing, and, as a poet, how could I pass on a book that was both a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize?
Som is of Mexican and Chinese heritage and sinuously blends the olio of his multicultural upbringing, infusing his poems with a linguistic playfulness as he celebrates, and laments, his multigenerational childhood. That playfulness often comes at the expense of understanding, however. For example, “… Li Po of cuidados & chingados. The rascuache Li Po / of cochinero, of makeshift. Li Po of Saltillo tiles, / terracotta—tierra mia—awaiting square feet.” I can’t deny the delightful dance of alliteration but without a modest grasp of the Spanish language (or a willingness to regularly look up the translation of words and phrases), the reader is frequently left guessing as to what’s meant.
I expected—or was at least hoping for—something more akin to Jericho Brown’s also-Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Tradition: unflinching, intimate, powerful. By contrast, Tripas feels flat, clinical, as if Som was simply reporting the facts, however lyrically, with whatever obvious skill, from some objective remove. I wanted to feel his heart on the page. Instead, I got history.
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