City Lights Publishers
September 2015

REVIEWED BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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The Puerto Rican migration to New York has been well documented by historians and sociologists are still discussing its sociocultural impact and ramifications. With 1.2 million Puerto Ricans living in the state, it is one of the largest diaspora groups anywhere. Luckily, there is something that collects, distills, and deconstructs the Boricua experience in the ghettos of the Big Apple: the poetry of Pedro Pietri. Unapologetically bilingual, brutally honest, and unfiltered, Pietri’s work chronicles the struggles of poor Nuyoricans as they navigate the diving line between two very unique cultures and two languages. His poems are rhythmically rich records that speak volumes about feeling landlocked, migration, discrimination, and survival. That makes them required reading for anyone attempting to understand not only the Latino experience in America but also the frame of mind of most displaced and oppressed minorities.

Pedro Pietri: Selected Poetry gathers the most important poems of the author’s classic books Puerto Rican Obituary, Traffic Violations, and Out of Order along with a selection of previously unpublished works curated by professors Juan Flores and Pedro López Adorno. The result is 240 pages of brilliant writing that delivers one of the sharpest looks into the Nuyorican experience ever offered. Pietri comfortably moves from absurd narratives and defenses of marijuana to heartbreaking looks at the effects of poverty/prejudice and passionate outbursts of melancholy and explorations of identity.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Pietri’s work is the ease with which he approaches complicated issues and delivers statements that demand to be heard. Take “Tata,” a poem that many schools in Puerto Rico give their high school students to read:

“Mi abuela
has been
in this dept store
called America
for the past twenty-five years
She is eighty-five years old
and does not speak
a word of English

That is intelligence”

In a short poem, Pietri manages to offer the story of an immigrant, make a critique of American consumerism, and comment on the issue of language and colonization. This is done repeatedly in Selected Poetry, but he balances that discursive heaviness with touches of humor and absurdity. The overall effect is something akin to the Puerto Rican saying of “baile, botella y baraja;” yes, we’re second-class citizens, poor, browbeaten, and living far from home in a tiny, decrepit apartment in the projects, but we have soul and rhythm in our veins, so lets keep out collective chin up and laugh at the whole wretched mess. The balance between joy and depression and humor and heartbreak is one of the few cohesive elements that show up regularly, and its presence is impressive considering there are three books and a lot of previously unpublished material here.

New York City is a melting pot of cultures, but each one of those cultures has had to endure bigotry. Interestingly, the plethora of skin colors found in Boricuas, along with the language barrier, means that they’ve historically suffered an array of abuses. Pietri, in “El Spanglish National Anthem,” boils that experience down to a few truths that cut to the marrow of everything that’s wrong in this country for people who aren’t white:

“In Spanish there were bills
In English there were bills
That just kept getting
bigger.
Categorized as hicks
We were called dirty spicks
Blanco trash and black
niggers”

Pietri was a pioneer of Boricua activist poetry. Flores, who sadly passed away in 2014, and López Adorno did a great job of selecting poems that would showcase his range and have an impact on a new generation of readers. They also left the random punctuation (or lack of it), the Spanglish, and the misspelled words intact in order to maintain the integrity of the work. Pietri wasn’t the product of an MFA program and his writing wasn’t refined; he was a gutter poet, a man who smoked weed while looking at the cockroaches around him and then wrote about all of it with unrestrained passion and a healthy dose of gallows humor. That hybridity is where the beauty of his work lies, and that’s why a collection like this should be read and celebrated, because it ensures that his legacy as spoken word innovator and his status as of the most explosively talented and unique voices in 20^th century poetry is recognized and exposed to new readers.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, TX. He’s the author of ZERO SAINTS (Broken River Books), HUNGRY DARKNESS (Severed Press), and GUTMOUTH (Eraserhead Press). His reviews have appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, 3AM Magazine, The Collagist, Heavy Feather Review, Crimespree, Out of the Gutter, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, HorrorTalk, Verbicide, and many other print and online venues. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.