Reviewing: Juan Felipe Herrera's EVERY DAY WE GET MORE ILLEGAL
There are some books that our booksellers just can’t stop gushing about, so we’re starting a review series to spotlight the titles we love, and think you’ll love too! We’re kicking it off with a review of Juan Felipe Herrera’s new poetry collection, Every Day We Get More Illegal, by Serena Morales.
In EVERY DAY WE GET MORE ILLEGAL, Former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera does it again: he saves America from itself by handing it a mirror. Herrera rescues the people—working people, migrants, those who are “green-yellow-brown” and “golden sienna ochre”—from invisibility through direct address. It is their stories that he honors and elevates, while refusing the myth that the state’s violence defines the people it oppresses, instead asserting that that violence defines the oppressive state. As in, the poem “Enuf” when the speaker declares “this is not a poor-boy story / this is a pioneer story / this is your story / America are you listening” or in the poem “Interview w/ a Border Machine” when the speaker says to a Border Agent “i give you / meaning” (italics my own) and later “i feed / meaning i / prepare a place more for you / than for the ones here.”
In this collection, the poet brings fragments of testimonies, songs, and his own journal meditations back from his travels through the American landscape. The result is a body of work concerned deeply with both recording and becoming, where the personal is expressed through the polyphonic, as the speaker’s voice is never just his alone, but an echo from the multitudes of poor and exploited migrant people, past and living. At the heart of these poems are a defiance of borders. If a border is a site of unspeakable violence, then the poem is a site to explore our capacity for love, ecstasy, and redemption. Herrera is a poet who continually rises to the occasion of the poem, charging them with this rich and abundant potentiality. Even the silences here are resistance silences. The white space, as proclamatory as the words themselves. Fans of Natalie Diaz, Aracelis Girmay, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo will find much to appreciate here. A revolutionary collection that centers the people, and reminds us to create space for communal care, hope, and healing.
Every Day We Get More Illegal by Juan Felipe Herrera is out October 2nd by City Lights Publishers.
