Museum of the Americas (Penguin Poets) by J. Michael Martinez

Museum of the Americas (Penguin Poets) Reviews

• 
  Roxane

  This is a fascinating, layered collection of poetry that blurs genre in some really interesting ways. Martinez offers, as the title suggests, a museum of the Americas, and especially engages with Mexican migration and its effect on the body. Given the goings on of the world, this poetry is especially timely. Real standouts include Skin Maps, On the Naturalization of Alien Immigrants and Bodies of 3 Men Lying As They Fell After Being Executed (that one is stunning). But really, every poem or prose in this book offers something beautiful or haunting or illuminating. It is didactic but not in a heavy-handed way. Every thought, every word, every image is precisely rendered. Outstanding stuff here. Check it out.
• 
  Julie

  Excerpt from the back cover, "Engaging beautiful and otherworldly Mexican casta paintings, morbid photographic postcards depicting the bodies of dead Mexicans, the strange journey of the wood and cork leg of General Santa Anna, and Martinez's own family lineage, Museum of the Americas gives accounts of migrant bodies caught beneath, and fashioned under, a radicalizing aesthetic gaze."
  
  J. Michael Martinez has created a book that is quite unlike others that I have read and I was fascinated and haunted by the beauty of the poetry, which transported me to another time and place. Museum of the Americas is divided into four parts.
  
  My favorite poems
  From part I:
  LORD, SPANGLISH ME
  
  From part II:
  "YNCINERACION DE CADAVERES EN BALBUENA" Postcard No. 35
  "EXECUTING BANDITS IN MEXICO" A Postcard by Walter H. Horne
  
  From part IV:
  THE WAKE OF MARIA DE JESUS MARTINEZ
  
  WHERE LOVE IS GROUND TO WHEAT for Maria Jesus Martinez
  
  "You were laid among lilies,
  
  the thin skin of the leaf, the interval, oak.
  
  pews bowing beneath the weight.
  
  If a stone were cast, your mouth
  would be the well anchoring the water's
  
  wish. And the word you would speak
  in that incommensurable depth
  
  could unlock space with a paper key.
  
  Beside the casket, I collect my tears
  before they fall so I may look at you,
  
  so the white down of children may fill the empty beaches again,
  so the bees may store the honey
  
  where mercy prepares the map
  of the forgiven within us.
  
  We are too many skies,
  we who cling to the visible,
  
  & the bread of my routines,
  
  now absent of you,
  are abundant with you."
• 
  Jerrie

  This poetry collection, while on the NBA longlist, did not make the shortlist. There are some excellent poems here, but a few that played with form were not as good to me. Many of the poems, however, give a strong message about the Mexican-American experience and the treatment of indigenous peoples in US history. 3.5⭐️
• 
  Kathleen

  My review for the New York Times Book Review:
  
  
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/bo...
  
  During the European Renaissance, men of wealth and learning put together cabinets of curiosities. The contents consisted of objects whose categorical boundaries — in natural history, zoology, archaeology, ethnography, geology and so on — were not yet firmly established. Also known as wunderkammers, or “wonder-rooms,” these motley (and often scientifically and culturally dubious) collections served as the forerunners of what today we know as museums. Like museums, these compilations were hardly neutral. In the words of the art professor Francesca Fiorani, these costly and hard-to-acquire assemblages “conveyed symbolically the patron’s control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction.”
  
  A great many of these cabinets contained holdings from the so-called New World, a place that the assemblers certainly had an interest in controlling. J. Michael Martinez’s third book, “Museum of the Americas,” won the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition, but its contents are unapologetically, excitingly hybrid, including prose, lineated verse, vintage postcards and black-and-white photographs. Thus, perhaps, this marvelous, argumentative and curiosity-provoking book is itself best thought of as a kind of corrective cabinet of wonders, one whose portraits and specimens complicate the dominant narratives of imperial conquest and control.
  
  Like a curator overseeing a show, Martinez gives readers the sense that each item he incorporates has been carefully selected and thoughtfully juxtaposed with the ones around it. In an eight-page poem-essay called “Casta Paintings, an Erotics of Negation,” he guides the reader on a tour of this art form, which first appeared in the 1700s when mostly anonymous artists began depicting mixed-race individuals (“castas”) in Spain’s American colonies. With the authority of a docent, he comments on “the calligraphic script underscoring each panel,” noting that “this man designates the ‘Spanish,’ the woman is the ‘mulatta,’ and their child, carrying a basket of fruit, Nace torna atras, ‘a Return-backwards is Born,’” and observes how “Language & oil combine to boundary the body into ‘race.’” With the voice of a teacher, he points out how “In the 18th & into the 19th century, casta paintings were employed in New Spain to validate racial identity (‘whiteness’) in the legislation of land acquisition & in determining civil rights.” And with the critical eye of a keen comedian, he remarks, “The cast: kinky historiographical exhibitionism. Sextastic.”
  
  Martinez’s approach is as brainy as it is entertaining, as political as it is personal. Throughout his heady exploration of the white gaze, colonial trauma and Mexican migration, the author audaciously asserts his well-read academic prowess, not afraid, for instance, to make the reader reach to understand an opening epigraph from Walter Benjamin about “the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape.” But so, too, is the book intensely embodied and intimate, its first section preceded with a photograph of Martinez’s parents, Jerry and Mary, at their wedding in 1974. In a later poem about this image titled “Family Photo — Slicing Their Wedding Cake,” he writes with obvious admiration of their youthful beauty and love:
  
  They were the story time
  & she, the elven smile
  
  wearing a dove falling to frosting
  & the curtains amber the parturient
  
  father shape blurred inside
  the foreground, auburn bright in snowed
  
  shirt ruffles
  
  Unlike many actual museums, “Museum of the Americas” wisely makes no pretense of being objective. Martinez subjects his chosen artifacts to pointed interrogations. In a series of pieces responding to the work of Walter H. Horne, a photographer for the Mexican War Photo Postcard Company during the era of the Mexican revolutionary general Francisco “Pancho” Villa, Martinez meditates on the white documentarian’s practice of mass-producing and selling graphic images of executions and war, effectively bringing about “a vast photographic immigration / of nameless Mexicans.” In “The Executioner’s Palisade,” he writes:
  
  Stamped for address,
  
  the paper carcass seals
  word to image,
  postscript to passage;
  
  the Mexican — all virgin talisman
  when mailed in a sepia ruin
  
  whose only wound is postage —
  the distance the body travels
  to know another.
  
  Martinez repeatedly calls the very impulse to display into question, from the touring around of the supposed head of the putative “criminal” Joaquin Murrieta to P. T. Barnum’s showing off of the prosthetic leg of General Santa Anna at his “American Museum in New York City on the corner of Broadway and Ann Street” to the document of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In doing so, he reveals that even though “display” ostensibly means “to make a prominent exhibition of something where it can be easily seen,” many such public presentations have problematically exploitive semi-hidden agendas. Even such commonly used labels as “explorer,” familiar to museum patrons from wall texts and audio guides, conceal countless unnamed pluralities and alternative points of view.
  
  In a piece called “Of Maximo and Bartola, the Aztec Children,” illuminating one especially egregious erasure, Martinez writes of the specious explorer John Lloyd Stephens, whose “gratuitous travel narratives had established him, in the popular imagination of the mid-19th century, as having ‘discovered’ the ‘lost’ Mayan culture.” Stephens even went so far as to use the appropriative pseudonym Pedro Velasquez “to authenticate his fiction linguistically.”
  
  Martinez’s power as a memoirist is considerable as well. In one of the book’s most unforgettable pieces, “Brown I See You, Brown I Don’t,” he blends his own experience of being identified racially by different people in different contexts, both threatening and non, with the psychological phenomenon of the Other-Race Effect, or ORE, the widely studied tendency of humans to most easily recognize the faces of the race with which they are most familiar.
  
  The root word of museum originally meant “seat or shrine of the Muses”; its use in the sense of “a building to display objects” was first recorded in the 1680s. In this thrillingly genre-blurring book, Martinez evokes both senses of that etymology: The poetic delights suggest the presence of the Muses, and the items upon which he encourages the reader to focus produce a fresh and necessary gallery that rivets both the interest and the intellect.
  
  
• 
  Courtney

  Yet another case of “maybe I would’ve liked this better if I could actually understand the writing”. Poetry is really hit or miss for me. I think the subject matter of this book is very important, but the meaning was lost because I couldn’t comprehend what the author was actually trying to say 75% of the time. I am simply not smart enough for books like this.
• 
  Skincare For Introverts

  Fave: "Brown I See You, Brown I Don't"
• 
  Craig Werner

  As with Claudia Rankine's Citizen, I admire the ambition behind Museum of the Americas more than I like the poetry. Martinez is very very smart about the contours of Latinx experience in a frequently hostile hemisphere dominated by Anglo simplifications and (mis)representations. His sequence "Casta Paintings: an Erotics of Negation," "Brown I See You, Brown I Don't," and the title poem all address the contradictions of life on linguistic and "racial/ethnic/national" borders with clarity and insight. Problem for me is that the book feels a bit prose-y, with only a smattering of passages that move beyond the paraphraseable content. So the three stars is more a reflection of my aesthetic than the quality of the work. Glad I read it, probably won't revisit.
• 
  Sam

  Museum of the Americas is a really admirable endeavor, because it aspires to be more than what books usually are. As Roxane Gay says in her blurb on the back cover, this collection “blurs genre in some really interesting ways … Given the goings on of the world, this poetry is especially timely.” Martínez is searching for something more than just poetry or prose here—a mix of art and instruction, the study of history with some music played behind it, ekphrastic investigations of the light and heavy elements that photographs carry within themselves.
  
  Honestly, I am not always the biggest fan of Martínez’s poetry. He has “it,” but I think that he does himself a disservice by so often restricting poetic line length and playing with spacing on the page. At times, the brevity really gets me—“this pivot / point so carcass / carved” (“POTUS XLV”) and “The man’s arms are / amputated by luminance” (“Executing Bandits in Mexico”). Poems like “Instructions for Identifying ‘Illegal’ Immigrants” and “Lord, Spanglish Me” have their moments, but the line breaks sometimes seemed out of place and the unusual spacing became distracting. “One Grave for 63 Men after the Battle” and the closing (and heartbreaking eulogy) “Where Love is Ground to Wheat” are examples of the good things that come from Martínez stretching things out into longer lines.
  
  What does really draw me to this book is how Martínez spices up didactic pieces. “If there is life, it is public domain” (“Triple Execution in Mexico”) draws a really interesting line from now to 100 years ago. The two parallel voices speaking in “Brown I see you, Brown I Don’t” make for an interesting dialogue. The series “Casta Paintings, an Erotics of Negation” and “Museum of the Americas” are telling historical tales of identity formation, but the poetic prose puts a spring in their steps. Sometimes the didactic does seem to take over—the untitled piece on p. 42 is like a conclusion at the end of an academic article, and the untitled piece on p. 16 seems like it could have done without the closing line, “The cast: kinky historiographical exhibitionism. Sextastic.” Sometimes it felt like he didn’t trust me to connect the dots on my own.
  
  All that being said, I can't think of another book like this. Martínez is wrestling with heady concepts, and his hands extend into the outer reaches to teach us about the historical roots of contemporary prejudices, to remind us that the US-Mexico border has long been a site of physical and political violence. He also reminds us, by focusing on themes of family and love, that we can draw strength from one another instead of venom.
• 
  Josh

  This is an interesting blend of poetry and nonfiction that tackles imperialism in the Mexican/American dynamic. The poetry is spliced with real neurological studies on racial identification, primary sources from the early 1840s-1900s when America was at least more obviously exploitative and racist.
  
  The poetry contains language that I could never hope of attaining. It's good. But I got much more out of the nonfiction. But it was fun to alternately learn some history and also marvel at some linguistic acrobatics.
  
  I obtained this book by accident. And yay, it was good.
  
  Recommended for poets with a proclivity toward history.
• 
  J

  Hmm… I didn’t enjoy this as much as I thought I would. I think it was a stylistic thing than anything, but I absolutely loved the nuanced exploration of Mexican immigration and the body.
  
  Some favorites: “Instructions for Identifying ‘Illegal’ Immigrants,” “Lord, Spanglish Me,” “Bodies of 3 Men Lying as They Fell After Being Executed,” “On the Naturalization of Alien Immigrants,” and “Skin Maps.”
• 
  Jake Phillips

  At times, I found this collection too prosaic, and at other times too abstract-- but there are plenty moments of beauty and truth in these poems. There are many times when J. Michael Martinez's focus seems to be on teaching the audience. While these moments tend to become prose-heavy lectures, they have important historical and artistic value, and I appreciated the opportunity to learn.
• 
  Denny

  I don't want to detract from Martinez' skill as a poet, but I did not enjoy this collection. My poetic tastes these days run largely to artists like Billy Collins. In this collection, at least, Martinez gives us a poetics of racial, political, ethnic, and cultural angst and anguish that's painful to read. I prefer being uplifted by poetry, not dejected.
• 
  Elizabeth Birr

  I love how the author doesn’t beat a dead horse: by this I mean that when something is poetic he just lets the scene speak for itself. In particular I found fascinating what he did with the postcard section of the book. The idea of someone making postcards depicting death is so powerful in itself that he lets you write your own poetry for it in your mind, and does very little elaboration on his part.
• 
  Erin

  While at times this book got a little graduate-school-seminar-paper for me, I appreciated the project of this book immensely. And that balance between the heady intellectualism and the bodily experience was astonishing at times.
  
  Two favorites:
  "Of Maximo and Bartola, the Aztec Children"
  "Brown I See You, Brown I Don't"
  
  
• 
  Emily

  3.5. Parts are very good, but too often it comes off as an exercise in vocabulary. Martinez’s command of language is impressive, as is his ability to address the complexity of the Latinx experience. At some points here it just feels like more of an unnecessary flex than a talent.
• 
  Jackie

  Stunning and haunting, a must-read collection.
• 
  Jaquie

  AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
  
  Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
  So much to love. I look forward to rereading this because Im sure I didn’t get it all the first time.
• 
  Hannah Gardner

  A boo about how “Language & oil combine to boundary the body into ‘race.’”
• 
  Chang Garcia

  I love the cover but not so much of the contents. What a disappointment.
• 
  Rolf

  Really enjoyed this execution of a compelling premise-using poetry to describe artifacts in a museum as a way of exploring the legacy of colonialism.
• 
  Beverly

  This was challenging to read. The more I re-read, discuss, and think about it, the more I admire it.
• 
  Amanda Kingston

  “We are too many skies, we who cling to the visible, & the bread of my routines, now absent of you, are abundant with you.”
  •••
  This is a chewy, thoughtful collection of poetry that examines the impact of colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy on the cultural, historical, and personal narratives. It's powerful for a host of reasons!
• 
  Sarrah

  Provided by #netgalley for an unbiased review. I want to say that, though I didn't personally enjoy this book, I can see how and why it was nominated for the National Book Award.
  
  Museum of the Americas, a book of very originally formatted poetry, is cavernous instead of deep and colorful in both attractive and unattractive ways. Museum of the Americas also wades through the hot-button issue of immigration from the immigrant's perspective. This is in no way light reading, which should come as no surprise. It didn't suit me, but I can see its importance and appeal.
  
  #museumoftheamericas
• 
  Jamie

  In “Lord Spanglish Me,” J. Michael Martinez writes, “Spanglish mi lengua para ti/ that I may break open the promise-space of my fear, & /become ladder;” a line that represents the heart of his poetry collection, Museum of the Americas. Martinez examines the historical context of immigration and assimilation from a perspective that moves between formal to deeply personal. The personal poems that work to preserve important family moments come as a refreshing shock to beautifully researched and denser poems for which Martinez is our “ladder,” up and through the rungs of images & history that define our people and this country. Martinez takes the reader through the research process: referencing art, photography, and philosophy as introductions to these poems. These moments bring to mind Natasha Trethewey’s historical poems in their breadth, form, and symbolic examination of these influences on our viewpoint. Martinez’s poems examine the body count of American culture, physical and spiritual, requiring the reader to reckon with a history that is ever present.