FROM: Compulsive Reader
Poet Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is a writer of place. A poet whose perspective stems from her hometown of San Gabriel and the San Gabriel Valley, out into the rest of the world. From a city with a deep traumatic history tied up in the colonialism and white supremacy of the San Gabriel Mission.
It’s a battle site, was one of the largest and wealthiest of California’s 21 missions, where the Spanish Franciscans enslaved the local Tongva natives, raped their women and herded Tongva together in large groups, where sanitation was wretched.
The San Gabriel Mission is just one of the many battle sites that make up Bermejo’s new poetry collection Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites, exploring the internal and external concerns about the current state of fear and chaos in America and how past unresolved fear and chaos can still haunt us. She underlies these poems with the same concern that ran directly through her debut Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge, finding home.
Incantation opens with “One Sweet Day: To Do List for the First Day of Spring,” functioning as the book’s introduction. Already there is a battle site, both personal and societal. Read Rest of Review Here
Brian Dunlap 