Lima :: Limón is rangier, freer to dip in and out of dreams, to try on voices, histories, and roles. Many of the book’s most beautiful poems shuttle easily between English and Spanish ... Her book is full of gorgeous, though problematic, cultural symbols; if you toss them out entirely, a world goes with them ... Like the fabric whose sutures create both its integrity and its vulnerability, people, in these poems, are real only insofar as they can be damaged, and complete only through the act of putting themselves back together. The tearing and stitching in Lima :: Limón isn’t exclusively metaphorical. This is a book about men’s violence against women; the sutures are often literal ... even pantomimed injury is, according to the logic of these poems, a result of real damage. Scenters-Zapico is at her best in lines that mingle pleasure and violence ... Scenters-Zapico often creates intensity in her poems by setting up an analogy, then knocking it down, only to prop it back up ... her astonishing verbal crossings reveal a mind as richly self-divided as any you will find.
...an exhilarating collection of feminist thought in verse form that never forgets to make music while sharply making its urgent, heartbreaking points. Lima :: Limón is smart and credible when depicting the hate and societal stupidity that feminists fight against, remembering to scream in song, never allowing itself to shriek too hard, turn tone-deaf ... The obvious melody of those stanzas carries through the entire book. Miss Scenters-Zapico’s music is so accomplished, that the book often reads like the score for a play ... In the end, though a book about men and women, it points its sharpest finger beyond that unit of two enacting the dynamics of power and submission, and trains it on a society that continues to allow the dehumanization and brutalization of human beings.
Lima::Limón is not just a collection of poetry, but a conversation that seeks to explore gender roles, machismo, and the figurative and literal borders that simultaneously constrain and liberate the body and its desires ... the speaker so aptly questions, 'How do you write about the violence/ of every man you’ve ever loved?' This is not easy to answer, but Scenters-Zapico has found a way ... Scenters-Zapico has offered us something to help with that; we in turn must do our part to continue unveiling the cruel reality marginalized women face, and bring it to the forefront of conversations we have on how to leave the world better than we found it.
... contains all the sharpness of something acidic—the pain and the brilliance, the pleasure, the stinging accuracy ... By linking the violence her speaker experiences to larger forces working on us politically and socially, Scenters-Zapico highlights the ways that gender can be a site at which our cultural and social systems inscribe themselves upon us—and how gender itself is a cultural expression created not just by larger culture, but by the ways we define ourselves against each other, as men do against women, as the United States does against Mexico.
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 ... A dazzling collection, it punches like spiked limonada.
Scenters-Zapico speaks fearlessly throughout this, her second book. In doing so, she illustrates what needs to change so that victims can be freed from the cycle of abuse.
The uncanny thing about this book is the way every word seems prefigured by the cover, the title, the length and width of the volume itself (longer and wider than usual), as well as its glossy softness ... Before I opened this book, I felt I was already inside it. Once I opened this book, the poet’s words were inside me, lodged like splinters I didn’t want to (couldn’t) remove: silver and glinting, their essential and persistent pierce ... The poems in Lima :: Limón take many shapes on the page. The chorus of speakers in this book require many shapes to sing their stories of heartbreak and perseverance ... a feat of exceptional pain and power.
[A] searing second collection ... Scenters-Zapico writes in a voice that is controlling, intense ... Reading this book often felt unbearable, yet as much as I wanted to turn away, her speaker’s incantatory certainty hooked me.
With 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.
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 ... 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 ... Throughout the collection, Scenters-Zapico inhabits an interstitial space between languages, forms, and traditions, evoking the fluidity of the self.
