Delivered
Rapprochement
The art of war teaches us to rely not on the chance of the enemy not attacking
but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.– Sun Tzu
My father called me a chink
so I’d know how to receive it.
So I wouldn’t be surprised.
Therefore the good soldier will be terrible in his onset and prompt in his decision.
In the wall, I bricked up my secret.
So it would gush forth. I did this for effect.
So you would know me.
On the day of battle your soldiers might weep bedewing their garments.
But it grew like a bullet loving its flowerstain.
It happened nonetheless.
But let them at once be brought to bay.
Because you are simply my medic watching me.
I’m a poem someone else wrote for me.
All of the characters “beautiful and flawed.”
When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far.
My sister said, you can forget our way of life?
I said yes and was annoyed. She ran away and I was desperate for her.
I was screaming into the mindspeaker.
When far away, we must make him believe we are near.
I said, Christine, christine, christine.
Reviews
I play on my america xylophone/ and the kids drop peach hat by aching peach hat,” says Gambito midway through one of the giddy, fragment-filled, enthusiastic, sometimes flirtatious odes and self-portraits of this second collection, attendant simultaneously to Gambito's Filipino-American heritage and the outlook of 21st-century youth. “I am the new bathing suit that I am,” she declares in “Immigration,” one of a few poems by that name: this one takes an epigraph from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and an interlinear exclamation from the Filipino language Tagalog. Gambito (Matadora) evokes a carnival of multiethnic references, intuitive leaps and fiery existential queries: “I like God alright but I don't understand anything he's talking about.” Gambito also excels in one-line stanzas, in long knockout titles (“A Borderless Ethos Would Please Everyone”) and in dreamy one-paragraph prose poems. Yet if such forms make her seem solitary or disconnected, her topics make her memories, and her loyalties, multiply clear: “You were born here. I was born there.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The poems in this second collection (after Matadora) are as much about language as they are about Gambito's Filipina heritage: "Eventually the children picked up English in school. The English was cool and light like a puppy but more useful" ("The Puppy"). If disjunction is a way of talking about or re-creating immigrant experience, these poems "deliver"-that is, provide and lead us out of-the incoherences built into cultural transplantation. They are surrealistic, fierce, and playful. Words are strange toys with movable parts, so that we find an "assailed/father/feather" in "Getting Used to It" and "beer battered novels" in "Your Mama's Rich, Your Daddy's Good Looking." ...Something real is also being born in these poems; something is delivered from captivity, perhaps language itself.