The Book of What Remains Book

Sáenz turns to memory, heritage, and the living desert as he confronts faith and contemporary politics

Library Journal

In poems set along the border, Sáenz (Calendar of Dust) reports his feelings—indeed, rage—about a variety of sociopolitical topics, including immigration. Using a conversational strategy, he delivers declarative, prosy lines, and the resulting confusion between poetry and speechmaking will blur the poet's voice for some readers. In most of these poems, Sáenz plays the role of performer or stand-up comedian in front of a zealous audience. His bitterness is reinforced by the overuse of certain words, such as spit: "Lenin! Lenin! ... Ahh, he's dead/ dead/ spit" and "This will give me an excuse to spit / When I am reading New York Times Book Review." Poetry of anger has a long and honorable tradition, as exemplified recently by the Beats and Ginsberg in particular, but Sáenz is not always so successful in finding intense language and rich poetic imagery. VERDICT These poems will interest readers who enjoy heated political poetry and share Sáenz's convictions, but the moralizing tends to undermine the concept of poetry as an intellectual and passionate process to capture and reshape life.—Sadiq Alkoriji, South Regional Lib., Broward Cty., FL