Lima : limón /

DEAR DELINQUENT, by Ann Townsend. (Sarabande, paper, $15.95.) With elegant language and turbulent feeling, this collection tracks the course of desire. "The mind knows when to stand back," Townsend writes. "Part of me / was not for order, but chaos." LIMA :: LIMÓN, by Natalie Scenters-Zapico. (Copper Canyon, paper, $16.) This book, by a poet from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, fixates on liminal zones: national borders, gender roles, the overlap between love and possession. "Isn't that what women do," one poem challenges, "laugh at jokes at their own expense?" HYBRIDA: POEMS, by Tina Chang. (Norton, $26.95.) Drawing on fairy tales, mixed-media visual art and other hybrid forms, Chang evokes the bottomless love and terror of motherhood as she describes raising her mixed-race son: "I know the world will find him / and tell him the history of his skin." SIGHTSEER IN THIS KILLING CITY, by Eugene Gloria. (Penguin Poets, paper, $18.) Jazzy, surreal, neon-lit, Gloria's new poems describe a culture of violence in the Philippines and especially America. The book ends on the image of a sign at a mall: "Karate, Guns & Tanning." AN INFUSION OF VIOLETS, by Nancy Naomi Carlson. (Seagull, paper, $19.) Carlson, who also works as a translator and editor, uses controlled lines and a lyrical voice to plumb the self, often with biblical overtones.

In her scintillating second collection, Scenters-Zapico adopts citrus, fruit derived through hybridization, a union of strands so closely related as to be inseparable, as a signifier of duality. With unabashed passion, the poet returns to subjects introduced in her first book, The Verging Cities (2015), further complicating binary notions of language, geography, and gender. In gleaming, evocative verse that combines Spanish and English, the poet interrogates her homelands of the mirror cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso while exploding timeworn notions of masculinity and femininity ("I call my man, Mi reina over & over"). Throughout the book, the violent specter of narcotics trafficking surfaces in visceral imagery ("where / I'm from it's a blessing not to be / a woman gagged by electrical tape / & bound to the hood of a car") and in the irreversible impact on those who have lived this experience ("I learned to read by sounding out the names / in obituaries of those who had died"). A dazzling collection, it punches like spiked limonada; to be read alongside writers like Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and Ángel García.--Diego Báez Copyright 2019 Booklist

Through a range of forms-tercets, prose hybrids, lyric strophes, and more-the poems in Scenters-Zapico's second collection (after The Verging Cities) incisively interrogate the aesthetics of cultural difference. "I want you/ to say my name like the word: lemon./Say it like the word: limón. Undress me/in strands of rind," remarks the speaker in the opening poem. Scenters-Zapico, who grew up on the U.S.-Mexico border, examines this cross-cultural overlap, positing her speaker as being at once self and other, and suggesting the internalized gaze of the predominant culture. She provocatively reveals her speakers as being complicit in their own exotification and objectification, as she implores, "I want to be lemons in the bowl/ on the cover of the magazine." Scenters-Zapico's formal dexterity serves the book's subject, as the instability of the language mirrors and complicates the speaker's self-aware performances of cultural difference. In "My Macho Takes Good Care of Me," she writes: "because he's a citizen de los united estates./ I got a stove this big, a refri this full, a mirror/ just to see my pretty face." Here, the speaker performs gendered tropes of femininity to serve her own material gain. Yet the neat tercets evoke her containment, problematizing the narrative itself. Throughout the collection, Scenters-Zapico inhabits an interstitial space between languages, forms, and traditions, evoking the fluidity of the self. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.