mónica teresa ortiz. Book of Provocations. Austin: Host Publications, 2024. 110 pages.




Towards the end of an interview with Infrarealista Review, mónica teresa ortiz states “I think that poetry is a study of incidents, small daily moments that interact with bigger life altering ones.” [1] This interweaving of the personal and its effect on the collective, how smaller moments of encounter are in relation to global atrocities (and vice versa), was present in their prose poem chapbook, autobiography of a semiromantic anarchist (Host Publications, 2020). Their second poetry collection, Book of Provocations, sharpens their study of the incidental nature of living with a more expansive approach to form, lyricism, and lineage. The inaugural winner of the Joe W. Bratcher Prize from Host Publications, Book of Provocations is a radical blueprint for reclaiming the role of poetry (and the poet) in the age of pandemics, genocides, climate catastrophe, and late-stage capitalism.

If the title wasn’t a clear enough hint, ortiz declares in the Notes section that the most important role of the poet “is that of provocateur, to prod the audience, to interpret a visible and invisible world, to unveil secrets through the communication of language, sound and meaning.” (96) In this collection, ortiz makes it their most important mission to tell their story and the story of their beloveds through fiery yet tender poems that eschew highly figurative language and intricate technique for a language of the people, a rhythm through which everyone can be a part of the story (and its telling). “these are my ordinary notes from an ordinary job” and “there is no forensic evidence that I should be / the only witness,” they write in “manifesto,” the poem that closes out the collection. (92, 94)

The provocativeness of this work comes from the anti-elite synergy between the choices of form and style and its politically engaged subject matter. Punctuation is spare, trains of thought are cut by enjambment, and various forms of listing often set up the poems’ core before landing on a gut-punch of an ending. “questions” was one of many poems that left me breathless with its final stanza:

did you come here looking for euphoria what invasive

                    species will grow over your grave
                    this is not the land that birthed you
                    none of us can return home I watch the
                    rabbit shoot out of the garden of plastic
                    flowers where you
                                             sleep

I dare not even whisper the ground anything but

                         tender (47–48)

The Book of Provocation’s topics include microplastics, hurricanes, oil drilling in Texas, a bombing in Oklahoma City, the pandemic, aliens, the Reagan-to-Trump pipeline, writing in Italy, toxic tourism, and love and pleasure amid global collapse. Disregard for Western (i.e. colonial) belief and political systems is countered with a reverence for the knowledge and memory of the natural world (“this is the first time I swam in an archive”). (82) The speaker moves from dissecting larger wreckages to intimate, life-affirming moments with its beloveds and community (“we are kin / queer         menaces           rising from ordinary rooms”). (60)

Amidst the horror of today’s world, ortiz shows us that beauty, pleasure, and the divine can still be found (and should be pursued) in the wreckage. These can teach us a thing or two about how to continue living amidst (and after) survival through the sensory: touching, watching. In “un/writing nature,” they proclaim “I encounter intimacy / when I press my hand against / rotten wood / divinity in its crude grains.” “fact-checking” speaks of pelicans returning to the Gulf of Mexico after Deepwater Horizon’s 2010 oil spill.

it’s true I watched pods of prehistoric

birds rendezvous over the Gulf again and

again colliding into the ocean

only to emerge—intact           like a prophet (74)

But don’t let pleasure distract you from bringing down empire! “the Internet asks us how often / we think of empire / I only think about how it collapsed,” they write in “Dante meets the dead.” (81) In one of the strongest appeals to revolution in the book, “if I could tell Ghassan Kanafani anything,” ortiz makes evident their political and poetic stance:

I won’t write elegies

for any nation               between

            bombs                   bullets                   borders

                           plague

we won’t rest until we press a sword to their necks

no lullabies left in cotton mouths

            our dead keep us awake (66)

Just like the sequencing connects various U.S. and global struggles, many of the poems entwine seemingly disparate topics or situations to showcase how oppressive situations around the world are interconnected. In “notes on a starry night,” ortiz webs the passing of a comet, the burial of their dog, distrust in Western scientific knowledge, an intimate moment with the cold weather, and never-ending deaths in their community to make a statement about memory, knowledge, grief, and intensity. “Is grief an ontology? / These necropastorals are not hyperbolic,” they think in “name of poem”. (63) If there is a term that could potentially summarize ortiz’s poetics, it would be the necropastoral. [2] Wait—the anarchic necropastoral. Yes.

The dizzying-dazzling flow of Book of Provocations’ fiery current is organized into three sections: “terrestrial,” “celestial,” and “afterlife.” ortiz navigates us in the first section through a Texan panhandle visual geography of calamity:

blue surgical masks

                                    in fields

                                                wind coughs

we count

down

till the Ogallala

depletes

stop tracking                           variants (19)

Home becomes “nothing but a simulacrum / map made of cavities                copies of / the future already tilled” (33) while glimpses of resistance give us hope (like in the electric “have you ever dreamed of flamingos” and the sonic wonder “a mapmaker looks at the stars”).

The second section, celestial, constellates the speaker’s thoughts on poets and poetry, queerness, memory, desire, and how we respond to never-ending suffering and death. The body is highlighted as an intrinsic part of creation, where memory and language reside. But this creation is not done on our own; ancestors and dreams, the “illogic,” are essential. “I stretch my hands into the dream world // hunt down the poems // trapped inside my organs,” they write in “the day we waited” (46). They continue in “cellular memory:” “are my organs now just cities of ancestors I must rebuild” (55). But the role of imagination and language, potentially colonized sphere of existence, are not dealt with lightly. “I fear categories and inventories / Words that are lawless / in our imaginations,” they confess in “echo” (41).

“This is memory work,” ortiz declares in the Notes at the end of the collection (96). Rooted with various epigraphs and multiple poems written for or after others, Book of Provocations makes it clear it wouldn’t exist without the writings, conversations, and exchanges with writers, beloveds, and intellectuals across borders and nationalities. Its third section, afterlife, concludes a journey towards a collective creation of a post-empire future. All creatures, including the natural world and ghosts, are welcomed:

“I am working / to decentralize the poet / to use my words as documentation of specters / even ghosts have dreams” (89)

“I long for the river / its thrilling mouth testifying / to a future                    approaching” (94)

Book of Provocations is a collection of poems that rejects the poetry world’s status quo and its consumerist industry and traces a map for community-driven art. In communion with writers like Wendy Trevino, Dionne Brand, and Fady Joudah, mónica teresa ortiz refuses to be a poet who “wear[s] gucci shoes to sing  / of palaces       while paleteros and peasants cultivate lakes   of lithium.” (17) Their archive of ordinary stories is an important step towards provoking effective, long-lasting change: “what an auspicious / moment to watch / empire fall” they write in “deviations from translation.” (33) I couldn’t agree more.





Notes

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[1] Juania Sueños and mónica teresa ortiz.“Texas 806, Anarchism, and Poetry: An interview with mónica teresa ortiz.” Infrarealista Review. https://infrarrealistas.org/texas-806-anarchism-and-poetry/

[2] The necropastoral was coined in 2011 by critic, poet, and publisher Joyelle McSweeney. “Necropastoral is a political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of "nature" which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/featured-blogger/70370/what-is-the-necropastoral