Keynote
Carmen Giménez Smith dares to demand renewal for a world made unrecognizable
Book Title
Be Recorder
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry
Poem Excerpt
when my children found out
the tooth fairy wasn’t real
it was the death of innocence
and the beginning of a new world
they’ll recall in their old age
as the days when we had
to begin to start over even
the hope myths keeping
us afloat revised to include
the bodies we used as ballast
not the end of innocence
but the beginning of futurity
rousing the earth to avenge
our bodies her munitions
—from “Be Recorder”
the tooth fairy wasn’t real
it was the death of innocence
and the beginning of a new world
they’ll recall in their old age
as the days when we had
to begin to start over even
the hope myths keeping
us afloat revised to include
the bodies we used as ballast
not the end of innocence
but the beginning of futurity
rousing the earth to avenge
our bodies her munitions
—from “Be Recorder”
Body
Be Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world. The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines that excoriate and sanctify. Carmen Giménez Smith turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion—against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it. This reckoning with self and nation demonstrates that who and where we are is as conditional as the fact of our compliance: “Miss America from sea to shining sea / the huddled masses have a question / there is one of you and all of us.” Be Recorder is unrepentant and unstoppable, and affirms Giménez Smith as one of our time’s most vital and vivacious poets.
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About the Author
Credit: Adam Fitzgerald/Krista Kahl
Praise
- “With an urgency propelled by largely unpunctuated language and nimble lines, Giménez Smith careens between devastating accounts of racial and xenophobic violence. . . . While taking on gentrification and border walls, white feminism and late capitalism, Giménez Smith manages to frame a queer, Latinx, immigrants’ daughter, motherhood poetics that’s entirely her own.”—The New York Times Book Review
- “As she documents a range of subjects — including reality TV, capitalism and the exploitation of immigrant workers — Smith questions how an individual’s experiences are shaped by the dominant culture and how to push back.”—The Washington Post
- “With a powerful allegiance to the freedom of free verse, Smith tells a sort of fragmentary superhero origin story about a girl who faces the disdain of her country to become a woman, poet, and mother.”—NPR.org
- “Be Recorder is necessary reading for our dark times. The collection reminds us of the rich, interconnected histories between both Americas, North and South, the one we live in and the one we wish we lived in.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
