Museum of the Americas

Martinez (In the Garden of the Bridehouse) carefully arranges a series of aesthetic objects, stories, experiences, and analyses alongside each other in a third collection—a 2017 National Poetry Series Winner—that operates as a kind of conversational, hybrid genre exhibit. He begins with a short poem about President Trump (“servant who sweetens/ only mirrors”) and ends with poems about the death of a grandmother (“Beside the casket, I collect my tears”). Much of the work in between focuses on the othered, aestheticized bodies of Mexicans and other Latin Americans within American history. Martinez proceeds via an ekphrastic analysis of casta paintings (in which mixed-race people are the subjects), sideshow oddities, photographs of executions in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, Catholic iconography and prayer, and regional legend. The book operates in a manner akin to Martinez’s description of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe: “a poetic where the historical subject traverses through vanishing into the naked color identical in time to its embodied ‘self.’ ” Martinez employs an incantatory, short-lined lyricism alongside no small amount of prose, mining and appropriating the language of treaties and racialized nonfiction and juxtaposing them with his own poetic theory, personal and cultural experience, and concise examinations of objects, documents, and studies, before spilling back into verse. Martinez’s effort is largely a beautiful, personal, well-conceived, and historically contextualized indictment of empire, the aestheticization of biopolitics, and the white gaze. (Oct.)