RaveOn the SeawallWith an unflinching gaze, Scenters-Zapico depicts a reality for Latinx fronterizas who have endured disappointment, abuse, and femicide in the El Paso-Cuidad Juárez region. However, she does so while acknowledging the generations of women who have sewn together traditions of resistance and resilience in the face of misogyny and machsimo ... Here, the prose poem elevates the content of the poem rather than the poet’s syntactic choices, revealing an unforgiving world in which men and women are tethered by strict expectation ... a clever undermining of the male’s place deepens with each line ... Scenters-Zapico is aware of how her poetry may or may not perpetuate false narratives or hyperbolic stereotypes of life along the border. She counters this dangerous possibility by directly inserting herself into the very themes and spaces she writes about — occasionally writing metacognitively about poetic craft when describing the lives of real women at risk. She even calls out the outsiders who treat the border as a simplified warzone of news coverage ... Mostly brutal, occasionally tender, and sometimes insurgent, Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s Lima :: Limón is as hostile and beckoning to be crossed into as the U.S./Mexico borderlands it explores. At times, the work intentionally peels away some of the superficial elements of poetry in order to amplify the acidity of abuse, exploitation and agony that women have and continue to endure in the poet’s hometown. Scenters-Zapico, though adept at commanding her language and art form, doesn’t forget where she comes from, equally concerned with her craft as she is with what is at stake: the histories of women silenced by male-dictated borders. These poems and their techniques are unfiltered and bitter and ruthless in their look at the lives of those who — due to cultural, socioeconomic, and political circumstances — are most vulnerable to being sliced open and ravaged at their cores.
