Brandon Som, _Tripas_

 THERE ARE ENOUGH young American poets working through the complexities of their identities that another volume of poems "built out of a multicultural, multigenerational home" (as the back cover puts it) would not necessarily get me to plop down $19.95 and start reading... but this one got a strong review from Stephanie Burt in the LRB, and that makes a difference. If Stephanie Burt says, "plop down your $19.95 and start reading," I am likely to say, "well, okay."

And Stephanie Burt is right again--this is a fine book. 

For one thing, Som's identity is complex in a relatively unusual way. He has a Chicana grandmother who worked the night shift at a Motorola assembly line until the factory was moved to Mexico, and Chinese-American grandparents who ran a corner store. Each strand, on its own, conjures up a relatively  familiar kind of story, but the interaction of the two has a particular twenty-first century fizz to it, a different poignancy (see, please, "Close Reading"). 

That one grandmother's job involves circuitboards generates a cluster of electronic imagery that becomes a way of talking about how poems come into being:

Tuning not lute but car radio, Cocteau's Orpheus
copies the broadcasts from a netherworld for verses--

his muse a circuitry my grandmother inspected

nights at Motorola. Before her shift, she put me to bed,
laid down beside me and smoked Parliaments--

each drag like a tower light to planes overhead. ("Antenna")

Electricity makes a useful figure for how poetry moves through the  world, if you think about it--operating in some boundary between the material and the immaterial, both controllable (circuits) and uncontrollable (lightning), powerful but visible only in its effects. (see also "Resistors.")

Som's inwardness with the grain of language is what really keeps the book moving. In "Tattoo," someone tells of the word "maseros" tattooed on her brothers' hands, which is not exactly "mesero" (waiter) or "masera" (a kneading trough) or "macero" (a mace bearer)--but what is it? does it "sound a resistance"?

               Addendum or 
annotation, their maseros revised
the sentence written on their body.
I carry that archive--what's stored
without inventory: a leaf, an aleph;
a casita in husk; a feminine eye inside
hoja: maize, maíz, masa--a maze
on fingertips. Hear the word again--
at its center a gristmill of cicada,
a mesquite both vessel and wishbone.