Other reviewers have rightly praised Controlled Decay for a technical and thematic wingspan that effortlessly seems to embrace the terse with the effusive, the global with the familial. And Jauregui’s range is undeniably impressive. To read Controlled Decay is to muster every lobe of your reading brain. Don’t open it sleepy and never assume you know what’s coming next. As for me, I watch Controlled Decay take shape like a difficult marriage between sharp and beautiful friends: I suspect they might be happier if they gave it up and went their separate ways, but I want them to stay together forever, just to see what they will do to each other.
She begins with a dance number, “Get On Down To The Floor To The Heaven Of Other Animals,” its long tumbling lines broken with spaces that work like musical notation, telling us when to breath, teasing us into rhythm: “live music alive the music I like should beat beat beat me to you the space / between nothingness is music nobody is music nobody has its music going / playing like minimal millennium coming like a horse a rebel horse[.]” She follows this immediately with “Mastriangulación,” a spare and allusive lyric that recalls the hieroglyphics of H.D. It begins:
River
horn
three horns
sea.
Voices I do not understand
call me to prayer
three times three
while the river pulls you
fast
to a secret garden
in the heart of the city.
The restless “reggaeton bumping / on my bumper cumbia del destino” of the first poem becomes the tightly controlled, commanding lilt of “three times three / while the river pulls you[.]” From the first pages of Controlled Decay, the reader is forewarned that this book will make no staid progressions and no easy assumptions about what poetry is and does. This poetry is expansive, with room for Benito Juárez and Bette Davis, lines from William Carlos Williams and signs from the Mexico City subway.
There are enough poems here for three or four chapbooks, and the temptation is to edit it into separate mental volumes, filing the poems under headings like “Playful,” “Pissed Off,” “Poignant,” and “Political.” But the book’s organization resists this impulse at every turn. The sections, headed with Jauregui’s drawings, do not divide or categorize the poems as much as they mark the interpenetration of categories. They are titled “Dust,” “Bone,” “Fat,” “Enamel,” and “Nail,” and they join these poems, as varied as they are, under the several flags of the imperfect, decaying body. There is no section where the political is cordoned off from the personal or the sensual from the deadly serious. We are meant to read these poems in contact, even in conflict with each other, and, at their best, these often surprising juxtapositions thrill and challenge the reader.
On its own, “Age” is a familiar kind of lyric:
the woman
walks
naked in front of a mirror
(distorted)
at the store
bad games we’re playing
at being human
absolutely naked
for nothing
doing hurts[.]
It has its delights and difficulties (the mirror-work of enjambment that doubles “we’re playing” into the partner of both “bad games” and “at being human,” the multiplicity of “doing hurts,” which tells us simultaneously that to act is painful, we act our pains, and that we bring pain upon others), but we know how to read it, we know what kind of poem it is. But, when we read it alongside “And Benito Was a Lawyer from Oaxaca,” its immediate predecessor, we are suddenly unsure. Here is history. Here is politics. Here is the murder of women, of particular women with names: Irene, Silvia, Mercedes. “And Benito Was a Lawyer…” ends
Juárez lost in no justice
and Benito was a lawyer from Oaxaca
and he would feel far away from home in this city
named for him
amongst the corpses of his granddaughters
slits endless
like mouths crying home
crossed out.
After this, to turn to the interiority of lyric, where the particularity of history is often erased in the reach for the timeless, must mean something else. We cannot think of the woman mourning her age in the store mirror without the mujer muerta, the dead woman, Benito’s granddaughters, haunting her reflection.
Jauregui’s sometimes jarring shifts in tone and form do more than demonstrate her virtuosity, they force us to question how we read. They crack open genres, reminding us of the realities of time and place that threaten the isolation of the lyrical moment and insisting on the possibility of private joys and griefs in the midst of the demands of our shared responsibilities to each other. Thus, too, they disrupt the all too easy process of categorization and division that walls off South from North, poor from rich, alien from citizen, woman from man, and other from self.
But these juxtapositions are not always so fruitful. The irreverence of “Loku IV”
on the freeway
a semi lies atop a semi
two dogs humping
is charming on its own. It is a smart little jab at the gravitas of poetry and the assumption, made by forms like the haiku, that observations of nature can lead us to a higher truth. But it is followed by “New Tribes Missions,” the first of three poems in the book to explore the heartbreaking ignorance and “cultural depletion” of the Christian missionary project in Paraguay. This poem is the first appearance of Ramona, a powerful matriarch who speaks against the silencing of her culture. The “New Tribes Missions” poems are some of Jauregui’s most moving work. They combine her restless rhythms, her visceral imagery, and her keen sense of ethical responsibility. Ramona warns her son, “fade your feathers / wither your song,” because “The missionaries are here” and “Instead of letting our throats bleed / with songs / they give us someone’s blood to drink.” “New Tribes Missions” asks its readers to listen carefully. It is unfortunate that these lines, calling before us lives in which much is at stake, echo with the “two dogs humping” of “Loku IV” thumbing its nose at Meaning.
Jauregui’s polyglot language play and wide-ranging cultural fluency perform a similarly difficult balancing act. On the one hand, Controlled Decay evokes a kind of pre-Babel intercommunication. In “Lalla Mira Hammam,” which end notes identify as “one of the oldest surviving traditional baths” in Morocco, Jauregui trusts that readers of an English poem about a Moroccan bath can move with felicity between cultures and languages. It begins:
scrub me
tell me more
about the Mexican soap operas
you watch in arabic
scrub me
savon noir
water rituals
rose water in my hair
you tell me we look alike
maroc-mexique
sisters or cousins
pareil[.]
Her trust does not seem misplaced. There is a certain tenuousness to pareil, which calls up its only importation into English as nonpareil, but the comparison holds and the women, from two different worlds, are allowed to be sisters, at least for the space of the poem.
But this conjunction of languages and cultures does not always succeed in creating a pre-Babel paradise. At times this conciliatory gesture seems hollow, even naïve. To put languages, peoples, and cultures together in a poem does not change the fact of their differences. “Minutemen,” begins with those differences and divisions, “borderdogs / keep them out / sniff them out / out / out,” and it draws a bleak picture of the possibility for crossing those lines:
what is being buried and marked
in tombstone, arizona
invasions
hordes
endless streams
vigilantes
endless lines in the desert[.]
But the end of the poem insists that the enemies are brothers, that the lines are imaginary:
two brothers fighting
over an invisible limit
drawn in the backseat
of their parents’ station wagon
which side is mine
which side are you on[.]
This kind of familiarity, its almost jocular chiding, rings hollow with the baying of the borderdogs’ “out / out / out” still in our ears.
I think, in the end, we are not meant to be comfortable in this book. Jauregui keeps us paying attention and she rewards that attention with complex and beautiful poetry, sometimes razor wire dangerous, sometimes chatty and inviting, always engaging and intelligent, musical and slippery. Those moments where the dissonance becomes distracting and the plurality fails to create true communication are the necessary risks of what Jauregui accomplishes.
