Shannon Vare Christine

Despite its slender poems and slim chapbook size, diamonds & rust, feels epic and mythic all at once. Catalina Vergara’s original Spanish verse forms reside on the left, and Tiffany Troy’s English translations are on the facing pages. While this placement serves a practical purpose, it also reinforces the conversational nature of these poems. The author and translator are exchanging in a dialogue as they pass these stories around the proverbial campfire, while likewise acknowledging the poems shared ties with the Joan Baez song of the same title. The song and songwriter, poet and chapbook, and then the language and translator all collaborate on a narrative of a “crummy planet…/desert of / rust”  where “you loosen / one hundred screws in my throat.” Each contributor to the creation of this book, in one way or another, aims to translate oneself, and the speaker of the poems does the very same. The speaker searches for the words and the language, scours the sky, the heavens for answers or a reprieve from their grief. In looking to the night sky, the speaker finds some solace by simultaneously embodying the traditionally masculine Mars energy, as well as the feminine Venus. Whether the speaker is on a quest to bury a former version of themselves, while resurrecting the newly formed planet of their being, remains to be discovered. The emotional weight of this burial process is personified as a devil, a monster, a lurking presence as “they tell me / in the pleiades” “the light of time / the silence of my closet / the letters of my name.” And before anyone is able to maintain a relationship outside of themselves, they must retreat inwards, to interrogate their own origins and subsequent rebirth.

In fact, at times, sometimes the first step towards this revival is plunging: “when they fall straight into death, its smooth, exploding / in an electrical howl emanating / from the bones.” The speaker must completely submit to freeing themself from whatever trappings are keeping them suspended in their current form. Their one true self can only emerge, animal-like and charged after this release. Repeated images of diamonds and crystals, sharp and glimmering, as well as images of reddish rust and solar explosions further emphasize the impending collision. This dynamic energy will either be used to create or destroy, to attach or separate. Otherworldly and surreal diamond lakes and dissipating stars, solar oil and absinthe silences serve as settings and counterpoints to both judgement and redemption. “i stay behind, between the sand and water, between last and first / visible star / the sands remnants filing your nails / from so much clinging to you and you.” The speaker as explorer must traverse these foreign lands, dealing with the obstacles and emotions along their path of travel. During so many moments in this book, there is a contrast between the idea of letting go and holding on, whether that’s to a relationship or an identity. There is a fine line between needing and wanting, and the speaker straddles this boundary time and time again as “life is just beginning where a new / moon is” and “with hands we pantomime / power / less to feel a / thing.” The speaker’s sense of feeling in control is often a ruse and if they don’t decide to give into these vulnerabilities they may be doomed to inhabit the current plane of existence, rather than transcending it.

As always, the personal is intertwined with the political in these poems set against the backdrop of American imperialism and the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile. Reading the poems within this context both inspires introspection and complicates interpretation, however this setting is also a fitting metaphor for the feminist speaker’s urgent desires to rise up, to escape the throes of suppression. “with hands we pantomime / power” “striving to fly” up beyond the patriarchal restraints “before the fleas realize we are made of sand—” The vibrations of this personal uprising, the practice of harnessing power, create an urgency, lest the oppressors realize their victim is vulnerable. “i want to call out your name / drowning for a while after / thought I no longer even know the first / letter / that’s the first letter of / my name…that some time from now / i will stop rotely / pronouncing” These lines indicate a shift in the speaker, a forgetting and reclaiming of their being, and a rediscovery of their individuality, their final push towards catharsis.

This catalytic force ultimately leads to “apocryphal poetry succoring your fingers—barge music drained / sleepy constellations” to a place of calm with an ominous presence, which is reminiscent of a soul’s solemn journey across the River Styx. Mythical rivers of passage offer meditative spaces of reflection as a soul is ushered from one life or entity into the next. The speaker will remain in a limbo of sorts, where the reader leaves them resting “rusted fossil / my body / awaits” gathering energy and sustenance for the moment of their excavation.