Not a better way to celebrate this day than to read the raw fierce new collection by

@statmanm Hechizo. In his previous collection, Exile Home. Statman rode the stimulus of the
landscape in Oaxaca and an enhanced intimacy with the Spanish language to create an elegant,
subtle, and lyrical poetic mode. (1/9)

Statman easily could have mined this mode for three or four books, made this more refined,
Stevensian posture the frame of the latter part of his oeuvre. Instead, Hechizo goes in the
opposite direction: jagged, unfettered, letting its art stem from the soul. An incanation, but in a
speech more excitable than gaudy. (2/9)

“Mexican songs” begins with the poet saying that their “sound sometimes/holy sacred to me/
like/synagogue prayers/ from when I was young.” But the sacredness becomes more than
merely incidental: “despair softness our condition/ that’s our turning to song/so that we in
love/lost love/abandoned love/our tears/can say at night at/dawn we wink the sun.” (3/9)

The cry is direct, almost brute, yet deeply felt, sonorous: “we in song long/for peace/long for
return/we long our spirits need/lifting far how fallen/we wonder at the life we wanted/so
wanted.” The pain and longing are so blunt they actually almost careen into the non-referential;
at the border of the truest speech and the sheerest sound. (4/9)

The poems also touch borders linguistically. “Chachalaca Pálida” says, of the bords, “there are
fewer/these days/people/caught so many.to eat sabroso muy/sabroso (delicious)/they don’t
lay many eggs/the eggs sabroso too.” (5/9)

Statman is far more involved with Spanish than most Anglo-American poets. This does not
mean the work is bilingual, hybrid, diasporic, or readable under the rubric of ‘la frontera’;
nonetheless, it gives the poetry a very distinct timbre, and makes its sound like no other. (6/9)

The ‘sabroso’ not only operates as a linguistic bivalence but as a thematic one: what makes the
birds delicious is what imperils them; our desire is locked in the Anthropocene, and any human
joy might also be ecological devastation. That language this direct can be this polyvalent is the
shocking, discomfiting revelation of Hechizo. (7/9)

“we in song long for peace long for return/” The vision and soundscape of Hechizo are full of
desire and spirituality, touch and yearning, attack and tranquility, and above all irrefutably,
tremendously alive. @statmanm (8/9)

The book is available fur purchase at this link https://www.lavenderink.org/site/shop/hechizo/?

v=76cb0a18730b (9/9)