cover image Güera

Güera

Rebecca Gaydos. Omnidawn, $17.95 trade paper (72p) ISBN 978-1-63243-024-3

Gaydos sifts through language, history, and landscape to address identity in her debut collection. The title comes from a colloquial Mexican term that roughly means white girl, and Gaydos confronts racism without soapboxing in these dense lyric poems. She also focuses on the mutability of subjectivity, displaying a wry mistrust of herself: “I can’t tell what it stands for because I didn’t already know and I’m no good at looking at things.” Her poems maintain a vigorous swagger, and she’s attentive to off-notes and implicit disjunctures. Part of what makes the book work is that Gaydos neither privileges her own perspective nor makes the poems explicitly autobiographical. She examines stereotypes of femininity in conjunction with borders, class, community, and tourism, such as a trip to Mexico where “the plan was to make camisetas/ on the front saying, I HATE GRINGOS/ on the back saying,/ I LOVE GRINGAS.” The text prioritizes assessment over anecdote, and the poems gain nuance through a sort of willful withholding of information and context. This sometimes borders on a not-unpleasant obfuscation—in each elliptical line, Gaydos makes connective leaps that are often several steps ahead of the reader. Gaydos avoids any impression of intellectual posturing through her dry delivery, which is often searing and plainspoken, and it makes for a spirited, analytical, and affecting collection. (Oct.)