Matadora
Dear Elation,
There is something else you didn’t know.
You cannot be two places at once:
wearing earrings for my return and packing up every mirror in your apartment.
You must not dream for the rest of us.
You must dream for the rest of us.
Whatever you choose. Get into the car and drive.
I often think of our one memory—why is that—when we have known each other so long?
There was amber light over the high walls of a city.
It is an old city.
Boys and colts were playing soccer in the plaza of the kings
The bay is reflected of amber, filtered through lantern-lights.
You were my friend.
Flapping hair.
Rife.
Feathering dress.
You cannot watch the same movie at twenty, at twenty-five.
Her blushes mean a different moment.
So, when this holds back
make plans,
make haste.
Make a jagged point in the rock.
You are the rock.
Reviews
Every once in a while a poetry book bursts onto the scene—heavy with luggage tagged from all manner of airports—just begging to be unpacked....Matadora introduces us to a fearless new talent, whose voice is sure to be a significant and sexy siren call—compelling us to return again and again to the poems in this remarkably stunning debut collection.
— Mid-American Review
In Sarah Gambito’s first book, a world is reborn and so to accommodate it the speaker assumes just so many multiple elations, all of them daughters and sisters of the things of the world. These poems fly in from other countires. They blur the speed of prayers with alt.rock lyrics. In the poems continents reverse themselves as if drifting in amniotic fluid, lines of lineage re-emerge and voices in other languages adopt themselves to various new forms of speech. The speaker arrives from time to time. She is like snow. She takes short holidays. She smiles at birthday cards. She flits from Tagalog to East Villagese. She has a halogen stereo and waits for 'my late great Chachi.' She tries on her butterfly kite. Through all this, she is the breathless sum of her various accoutrements: crystal and sea-egg, a borealis, a lamp, a holidaypipe, a Paloma, a sister. A beautiful book.
— Tan Lin
The poems in Sarah Gambito's first book, Matadora, are sheer juxtapositions of anything--star fish, Tagalog, frisson-- and the friction very often adds a political dimension to the poetic. Lovely!