Pinion

Monica Rico

• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781954245907
• eBook ISBN: 9781954245914
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

"I / step into the kitchen because I can / no longer smell the lilac / bush my father cut down," Monica Rico writes in the opening poem of her astonishing debut collection. Deeply invested in unearthing women's identity from a patriarchal family structure, these pages catalog life beside loss, the truth of cruelty accompanied by a defiant vitality. Here, where the declaration "I can" is modified to "I can / no longer," Rico untangles the paradox of love, how a persistent absence keeps the missing object present, asserting itself through grief and memory; the scent of lilac lingers precisely because we cannot smell it anymore. The dual meaning of "pinion" scaffolds this collection, which considers Rico's family and their experiences in the context of her grandparents' immigration to the USA from México, American racial capitalism, and the mass migration catalyzed and necessitated by Western colonialism. "Pinion" in noun form refers to a bird's outer flight feathers; in verb form, it means to bind or sever this part of the wing to hinder flight. Bound up in this word, then, is a thing and its destruction — a possibility and a thwarted hope side by side. Rico creates her own motifs to write a representative genealogy, approaching her family as an ornithologist: across poems, her grandfather (who worked at General Motors) appears as an owl, her grandmother figures as a robin, and the American project shows up in the eagle's warped beak and surveilling eye. A field work of restoration, these poems compose a personal history and a deconstruction of global capitalism as articulated through an encyclopedia of birds. From the chaos of our flawed world, Rico salvages an enduring hope, reminding us that "a broken / song like an ugly duckling isn't ugly / but unique, and stands out like the flightless / dodo who trusts because it is too awful not to." 

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• An Unusual Bird Divides the Sky
• Mise En Place
• Heartbeat and Humidity
• Stolen and Unnamed
• Cutting the Tail
• On the Eve of the 2017 Presidential Inauguration
• Yes, In 1952 White Teachers Made Their Students Stand Up and Tell the Class What Their Fathers Did for a Living
• The Marriage of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera
• Citizenship of the Owl at General Motors
• Why I Don’t Go to Church
• The Noiseless Flight of Owl Wings
• And When We Return, We Are Water
• Engine Block (Exploded View)
• Great Horned Owl
• Patrilineal
• Behind the Back of the Robin
• Poem in Consideration of My Death
• The Eagle, Not the United States
• In the Presence of the Robin
• Set Free
• In the One Photo I Have of My Grandmother
• Tomato and Lettuce
• Mexican in Michigan
• John James Audubon and the Battle of San Jacinto
• Get Out of the Water
• Past the Forty-Fifth Parallel
• México City in the Middle of Michigan
• Ferment
• The Vows of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera
• Resurrection of Prey
• Ornithology
• The Owls of Saginaw
• Luxury
• Elegy for My Quinceañera
• Each is Another and No Other
• Learning to Sail, I Can Only Think of Odysseus and Ask to Be Tied to the Mast
• Robin
• Shotblast
• The Universe, According to Rufino Tamayo
• Ode to the Grocery
• Second Shift
• Hooked Lace
• Hand Over Heart
• Brain Food
• Hemingway Country
• Lessons on Becoming Full Grown
• What I Found
• Feeding Rituals
• Sacrament
• En Español Por Favor
• Optics
• Shade Tree Mechanic
• Where the Girls Are
• In My Own State
• What Remains of General Motors
• La Patria
• Get Out of My House
• What General Motors Doesn’t Protect
• To Skip a Stone
• Northern Cardinal
• Soy De La Luna
• Domesticate
• Five Things Borrowed
• Birds of a Feather
• Forecast
• Only the Snow Will Quiet the Robin
• Figurehead
• Analog
• The Robin Who Turned to Snow
• My Mother and the Cardinal
• A Lesson from My Father About Electricity
• American Crow
• Parallel Universe
• Cortés Burning the Aviaries
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author