In speaking another colonizer’s language — English — Giménez Smith twists the language upon itself and, in referencing the nativist rhetoric of the Trump regime, undercuts his key slogans and ideas ... In 'Make America Mongrel Again,' Giménez Smith writes that 'Mongrel is multiplatform art that critiques, high and low culture, and deploys a pointed critique borne of dismay and urgency.' I can’t think of a better description of Be Recorder After the 2016 United States presidential election I found myself paralyzed and hopeless; Be Recorder gives me hope. Be Recorder is necessary reading for our dark times. The collection reminds us of the rich, interconnected histories between both Americas, North and South, the one we live in and the one we wish we lived in.
Giménez Smith nestles the book’s sprawling, associative, surreal title poem amongst the clear, often incisive ones of the other two sections of the book. The book’s first poem, Origins,... lays the groundwork for the complication that Be Recorder addresses ... sections of more narrative, crystalized lyrics help us approach the title poem, 'Be Recorder,' which beats like a hidden heart in the center of the collection. The poem is remarkable, epic, and important. It inundates us with the often-uncomfortable realities of living in a time and place that bears down on the self and enforces conformity and adherence to white supremacist, sexist, and heterosexist values; xenophobia; and desperate capitalist consumption ... the chaos, dissolution, and bleakness of this vision of the world underpins the quieter, more narrative poems in the collection and is matched by the urgency of the speaker’s 'revisionist chronicle'—her fantasy of a future...and her petition for us to...'to turn hate/into light.' The vision presented in Be Recorder, then, isn’t completely bleak. Hope is seated in that active, astute, and vigilant speaker, who is capable of recording the monolith, deconstructing it, and reassembling it as a world that looks a little more like one we can bear.
Be Recorder is a mirror, or rather funhouse mirror of America—confusing, disorienting, multi-faceted, excessive, distorted. These poems are muscular tonally, but there’s also self-deconstruction everywhere, leading to a book that has multiplicities, is multiplicities, is the self, is America ... In these poems, the reader senses that time is always running out for the speaker, but it is also running out for our country, for our earth, and for humanity ... there’s an implicit understanding that the self is complex, can be both creator and destroyer, victim and perpetrator ... each line, each word, each phrase, effortlessly shifts into the next, but with each new thought, the puzzle gets deeper, more complicated, and the language more sinuous and alert. The language in these poems is alive ... In a book with so much desolation, however, there’s ultimately hope in language, in Giménez Smith’s language that not only bravely names the dilemmas of our time, but also boomerangs language into the mind and heart of the reader, as if to say, we must look into our collective memories and past in order to make a different kind of future, all the while acknowledging our own culpability within our vastly diminished society.
[Smith's] most ambitious book to date ... [a] fierce and undaunted voice that speaks her poems ... a powerful allegiance to the freedom of free verse ... At the center of the book is the title poem, an extraordinary drifting dirge that swallows everything it can from memory, the imagination, and the culture at large to speak publicly and personally as a person of color in today's America, alternately cynical, triumphant, and wary.
Carmen Giménez Smith brings readers an award-worthy, cling-to-every-word collection with Be Recorder. I found myself at the last line of several poems shaking my head with a rousing mmm mmm mmmmm. Divided into three sections, this poetry bliss moves through mythic moments of creation, calls to action and complex relationships ... The foot never lets off the pedal as Be Recorder shifts toward the familial, taking on Alzheimer’s and motherhood. 'I Will Be My Mother’s Apprentice,' 'Beasts' and 'American Mythos' make this book a standout gift for adult children of aging parents.
A work of lyric activism ... With an urgency propelled by largely unpunctuated language and nimble lines, Giménez Smith careens between devastating accounts of racial and xenophobic violence to scathing satires of the 'American dream'...While taking on gentrification and border walls, white feminism and late capitalism, Giménez Smith manages to frame a queer, Latinx, immigrants’ daughter, motherhood poetics that’s entirely her own.
Giménez Smith turns a sharp, sometimes withering eye toward contemporary culture ... The work expands as Smith questions what it means to be an American and turns personal as she describes her mother, who became a citizen decades ago but lost those years and more to dementia.
...all [the poems] knocked me out ... Smith...can be sardonic, insightful and worried all in the same line—and she’s never afraid to express her anger ... Moving between short lines and prose poems, Smith’s urgent verse can be sharply political or tenderly intimate, confronting the persistence of racism or exploring her mother’s decline into dementia.
Anyone who has ever questioned the capacity of poetry to do something needs to read Carmen Giménez Smith’s newest collection ... refuses to pretend it lives elsewhere, in some untouchable world of the lyric. Rather, each poem is undeniably here, in the now .... sees everything, even what it has yet to witness ... It is this impulse –– to witness and uncover, while also pointing toward the unknown –– that makes this collection and its politics so compelling. You don’t even have to open the book to hear its first demand, conveyed through the well-chosen title ... operates as both a mirror and an imagination. We are rallied by it, called to attention, to action, to sight.
With a prophetic voice rooted in awareness of a dying planet, 20 poems and a middle lyric sequence are impressively served by Smith’s ear for pithy encapsulation ... Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Smith’s writing is its refusal to downplay the speaker’s complicity in a Darwinian system of profit, in which shopping at Amazon equates to 'baring my economic thorax.' ... Smith’s image-driven metaphors circle the 'molten core of the real,' articulating shared dilemmas while jolting the reader out of complacence.
In Be Recorder, her most important collection of poetry to date, Carmen Giménez Smith retains the signature notes readers seek in her poetry ... her topics are by turns humorous, heartbreaking, and affirming; her lines are linguistically playful and complex. But in Be Recorder Giménez Smith’s speaker asserts power as specifically rooted in her Latinx, descendant-of-immigrants identity. By giving readers 'the context for the twenty-first century Latina lyric I,' she does nothing short of destabilizing our current MAGA-loving moment and mapping a new national order ... Part immigrant’s daughter, part harried mother, part citizen-revolutionary, and all oracle, the speaker in Be Recorder establishes herself as the Sybil of our troubled nation. She is both real and mythic, horrified and hopeful. Through this profound investigation of 'America' and what it is to be 'born foreign in America' Carmen Giménez Smith not only reaffirms her place as one of our nation’s foremost poets, but demonstrates the role poetry can play in cultural criticism. Through the title of the collection and its continued exhortations, she calls upon readers to take the first step towards doing the same—to record, such that someday we too may proclaim.
Few books of poetry are as acutely attuned to the present moment as the most recent title from the prolific Giménez Smith ... In deeply personal, unquestionably political verses, Giménez Smith proves to be a master of tight concision and unexpected turns of phrase, as when a speaker invokes epigenetics, inherited trauma, and ethnoracial legacies in America by confronting 'the battle older than me in my helix' ... Bold and unapologetic, this collection is everything poetry needs to be in our age of hateful, anti-intellectual race-baiting: deeply thoughtful, urgently provocative, and endlessly imaginative.
... accomplished, vibrantly subversive ... Giménez Smith asks key questions in roiled times, and her greatest strength is nailing an outsider’s raw uncertainty, assumptions never made, immunity never achieved.
