Poetry by Carissa Natalia Baconguis, reviewed by Adam Michael Finney
SACRED AND PERISHABLE (Nine Syllables Press)
In Sacred and Perishable, Carissa Natalia Baconguis, elevates queer friendship through the story of Carlos and Dian. With a non-linear narrative arc that oscillates through timelines from 2005 through 2020, the chapbook tells the story of these two characters and their interwoven lives. We begin in the Philippines in 2005 when they are adolescents; Carlos confides in Dian that he is a shapeshifter who “transforms into a girl in the night.” From there, the relationship evolves—not into romance so much as a kinship. Baconguis explains in the ”Afterward” that “she wrote Sacred and Perishable to explore gender and queerness as a lived experience and as a human relationship of connection.”
While the poems in this chapbook are primarily lyric, they vary in point of view, poetic form, and even their orientation on the page. These shifts affect the narrative’s lens and frame work, resulting in a synergy that ultimately amplifies the lyric intensity. The poems centered on Dian have a close third-person vantage with some of Dian’s imagination and memories included. The poems centering Carlos are told in the first person, presenting a different point of view of both himself and Dian. Consider this direct address from Carlos to Dian in the poem “Carlos Explains Shapeshifting to Dian, 2007”:
but i’m not a boy, i’m a beast,
and you’re not a girl. you’re a beast,and i think you have to learn how to disappear
comfortably when you know you’re bound to be feral.
Carlos speaks directly to Dian, saying exactly what he thinks. Whereas, the poems centering Dian in close third-person narration, such as “Dian and The Investigation, 2017,” present Dian’s subjective reality often as thoughts or narrative descriptions:
When Dian was eighteen,
she wanted to impress her mestizo boyfriend
by waxing her bikini line, which meansshe wanted him to the point of dysmorphia.
…………………………………………..Dian thinks, I am inventing a meaning, Carlos,
for your anatomies. If you are not a science,perhaps you are a metaphor.
Baconguis’s insertion of a more omniscient narrative lens while in the third-person allows broader narrative context, which mirrors the reader’s knowledge of the future (due to the non-linear arc). This is most evident when she writes of the future in “Dian Receives The Scholarship, 2007”:
Dian is leaving Carlos,
which is to say,she’ll see him everywhere,
even her soup.
This subtle move (and other insertions like it) makes the narrative frame of the chapbook defy a comfortable or easy pattern; the insertions continually add layers to the fictive scene. In the above example, the character Dian could not know (at least in the time of reference) what she will see in the future, but the speaker can make such a vatic declaration (“she’ll see him everywhere”).
Since so much of the narration is close third or first person, this slight shift toward a more omniscient narrative works not only to adumbrate events, but also to overlay another perspective. Baconguis does this with narrative-insertions as questions that place Carlos and Dian as players in a broader inquiry or a more expansive narrative framework. Baconguis guides the reader through this perspective, in part, by adjusting the orientation of the text. “Dian Receives The Scholarship, 2007” (and others) are presented horizontally, rather than vertically, so they appear as such:
While we may infer that this rotation implies a kind of broadening or recalibration of the narrative frame, the poems centered on Carlos still use the first person. This first person, though, is an opportunity for Baconguis to expand the narrative through Carlos’ visions and dreams, as in these excerpts from “Carlos, 2017.”
i once dreamt of dian like i always do
she was hysterical in her apartment i’ve never been there
in front of the mirror bashing her sweet head against the glass
…………………………………… ……………………………………
in this dream. so i ripped her open and there was nothing
…………………………………… ……………………………………
it try to measure the walls count all the hollow ribs. and then
i stepped into the cavity of her
(For ease of reading, I’ve presented the lines in standard orientation. An image of the printed page is below.)
In The Art of Restlessness, Dean Young describes the project of poetry, saying, “A poem asserts itself as poetry by being in dialogue with what it resists.” The poems in Sacred and Perishable are often in “dialogue with what [they] resist.” With the manifold vantages and forms described, the chapbook resists traditional expectations of both poetry and narrative. Likewise, the poems resist narrating external violence as plot point or hinge. Instead, what Wallace Stevens termed “the violence within” is often a figuration for grappling with the pressures and limitations of embodiment in a world of historical and cultural mores that would amount to an erasure. The chapbook limns the edges of this erasure as it is witnessed by its characters. Carlos’s secret and the need to keep it to avoid erasure is introduced in “Dian Keeps A Secret, 2006”:
And so you will be the only one to keep this secret
for now I curse you with the burden of myself.It was easy then for Dian to ask, what kind of curse
is a friend? Of course, the kind you learn to lovein the same way the cockroach is tricked
that the hair strand tied around him is a limband that his body is unbound, unbothered,
and his own.
The parallelism that Baconguis has set up here is complex, but, to my reading, Carlos’s “curse” is the knowledge of his secret, his transness, and once Dian has this knowledge she, too, is changed. She will not see herself or life the same, and this “curse” is analogous to an appendage that one considers as one’s own but is tethered to some broader context . When Dian eventually leaves Carlos, they will remain connected, as she sees him everywhere (“even [in] her soup”)—when she is at medical school in Manila and, later, when she leaves the Philippines and is mourning “for a home she never had.”
Throughout their friendship, Carlos foreshadows his erasure. First, having defamiliarized himself into a “secret,” a “burden,” someone who Dian must “learn to love” because of his tenuous existence as a shapeshifter, and then when he catches up to Dian in “Portrait of Dian Meeting Carlos After Ten Years, Part 1, 2017,” he says, “…you be the doctor | i think | i’ll be the body | you gaze upon | trying to figure out | how to save a life. . . .” Eventually, the end of Carlos’s body parallels Dian’s entrance into motherhood; her exhumation of his vision parallels her reckoning with place as she is in a land with “winter,” outside of the warmth of the Philippines. Even the negation of Carlos is resisted as his heart is “smuggle[d] . . . [and] saved for later” by Dian in “Dian Mourns, 2017.”
Despite its clear (however non-linear) arc, shadows linger over some of the specific details within the narrative. In this way, the poems again engage with the pressures they are resisting.
Baconguis says in the “Afterward” that the book is not intended to be a “crime mystery.” So, when we learn of Carlos’s death, the particulars surrounding the event are mostly left elided as a conscious resistance to any impulse to solve for the forensic details or to quantify trans violence. Instead, we are told in “Dian Reacts to Carlos’s Corpse, 2017,” that
Carlos lays on the ground. Graceful still despite
her innards on display. Like she was painted
into being. Her brown skin coated shades of vermillion.
Ironically, perhaps, Baconguis does not shy away from realism (in the afterward she references “body horror” as a subgenre). While we never find out exactly how Carlos dies or which act of violence ends his “shapeshift[ing] life,” the recurrence of decay and dissolution help construct the monument of memory.
Ultimately the compelling pursuit at the heart of Sacred and Perishable is not in solving for blame or for a cathartic release from the spectacle of violence, but in the survival of beauty-as-self-actualization in a way that transcends dissolution. The reader gains the vantage of spectator in the muses’ temple, its portal of assembly; here, the chaos of friendship is always extending beyond the “two countries / of quiet want,” into the promise of better days. The text grows in resonance as the death of Carlos is weighed with the enigma of his living, of Dian’s processing, and the reckoning with negation through life for those who can continue into “the happy future.” Baconguis’s final message to Carlos is a brief apologia that “Carissa was born instead.”
Throughout the uncertainty and irresolution in Sacred and Perishable, the voices of the speakers—their rawness, the defamiliarized union—depict a kind of bond that encompasses and envelops. To borrow a phrase from Louise Glück, Baconguis’s characters—and, accordingly, the poems through which we come to know them—are “undulant, more fire than marble.”
Released on October 7th, Sacred and Perishable is Carissa Natalia Baconguis’s debut poetry collected and was selected by torrin a. greathouse as winner of the second Nine Syllables Press chapbook contest.
Adam Michael Finney studied poetry at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, graduating in 2004. After traveling in India and working in Yosemite, he decided to become a high school teacher. He still teaches in the Northern California foothills. He is currently an MFA student at Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers. His poems are published in Allium online and the surf magazine Addiction; this is his first published review.
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