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Black Lavender Milk
Black Lavender Milk is an experimental lyric that dreamt of becoming a novel only to wake up as notebook. Employing and smudging elements of poetry, prose and memoir, Black Lavender Milk offers the space of a “novel” as a site of mourning, inquiry and recuperation. Through a complex, hypnotic blur of language, the lyric-as-novel functions as an extended meditation on Writing in relation to the Body; Time, Loss, Ancestry and Dreaming.
- GenresPoetry
136 pages, Paperback
Published December 5, 2015
2 people are currently reading
265 people want to read
About the author
Angel Dominguez
5 books8 followersAngel Dominguez is a Latinx poet and artist of Yucatec Maya descent, born in Hollywood and raised in Van Nuys, CA by their immigrant family. They're the author of RoseSunWater (Operating System, 2020) and Black Lavender Milk (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015). Their third book, DESGRACIADO (the collected letters) is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2021. You can find Angel's work online and in print in various publications. Angel lives in Bonny Doon, CA.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 20, 2020
As soon as I started, I knew this would be one of my all-time favorite reads. I don't have enough words to convey the depth that I felt, the void in my chest filled with black lavender milk, making my muddy memory less insecure, less guilty, more dream-like. I cannot recommend this enough.
"Water remembers. We do not. I need more time. I need you to believe me" (86-88).
"Water remembers. We do not. I need more time. I need you to believe me" (86-88).
December 12, 2024
Besides the many obvious rituals that Angel Dominguez presents in his book, I am most
interested in the setting of the plane as a possible means (or anti-means) to his rituals of
connecting with his family’s homeland. The airplane represents transportation back in lineage, in
time, in language, to the Yucatan peninsula. Yet it is the source of the problems as well as the
only way for him to understand himself: “I keep waiting to arrive to a point in my life where the
air is hot and thick with ancestral-familiarity, where I stare back into a portal or a space of
recollection, clear as sky.” (18). Dominguez sees the airplane as a state of limbo, one that
signifies the state of processing what is going to happen on a trip, or what has happened after the
trip.
This container of transit stands out amidst the many instructions for rituals, many of
which cannot possibly be done at the airport, or on the tarmac, as he claims. However, transit is a
form of tangible ritual that he cannot escape; his grandfather emigrated to the US, and now the
speaker’s Spanish is mediocre. A failure, the way he admits his writing repeatedly fails too: “I
keep trying to form: narrative. I keep trying to write a “novel.” I fail.” (138) compared to the
Spanish he attempts on the following page, misspelling basic words like cuando (“quando”),
mantener (“mantenar”), posible (“possible”), etc. (139)
The vessel of an airplane functions like a schrodinger’s cat experiment as well, where his
writing is and isn’t occurring at the same time: “Waiting releases writing; most of this book is
(not) happening somewhere in an airport or transit vehicle; as you’re reading, I might be above
the continent, reviewing this sentence and wondering how you curved the light into your pupil so
gracefully;” (95) This space of transition and uncertainty is the one place he can’t perform
rituals, so instead he is forced to plan them, to write them down and share them. Without the
limits of the airplane/ airport/ tarmac, the speaker would not have been able to write these rituals
down. His writing would have failed entirely. He would have dug dzonots in silence for the rest
of his life.
The dzonots are the source of the spiritual magic of the book, yet they are stories,
retellings, parts of the notebooks and compositions. While the airplane/airport is the actual
setting of this book. It makes me think about writing in between bouts of sleep, with a painful
neck, and cramped legs. Dreaming often in the naps. Fragmentation. “Lightheaded sleep brings
you to a series of awakenings. In 21 minutes, we will encounter/discover/create the earth.” (155)
Finally, on the last page, he invites the disgruntled spirit from that transitory space into firm
ground: “keep waking up with me, practicing dreaming, somnambulist” (156) and this way the
writing is allowed to fail; in fact it is what makes it special for him, the schrodinger’s cat, the
ability to write and not write, ritualize and not, at the same time.
interested in the setting of the plane as a possible means (or anti-means) to his rituals of
connecting with his family’s homeland. The airplane represents transportation back in lineage, in
time, in language, to the Yucatan peninsula. Yet it is the source of the problems as well as the
only way for him to understand himself: “I keep waiting to arrive to a point in my life where the
air is hot and thick with ancestral-familiarity, where I stare back into a portal or a space of
recollection, clear as sky.” (18). Dominguez sees the airplane as a state of limbo, one that
signifies the state of processing what is going to happen on a trip, or what has happened after the
trip.
This container of transit stands out amidst the many instructions for rituals, many of
which cannot possibly be done at the airport, or on the tarmac, as he claims. However, transit is a
form of tangible ritual that he cannot escape; his grandfather emigrated to the US, and now the
speaker’s Spanish is mediocre. A failure, the way he admits his writing repeatedly fails too: “I
keep trying to form: narrative. I keep trying to write a “novel.” I fail.” (138) compared to the
Spanish he attempts on the following page, misspelling basic words like cuando (“quando”),
mantener (“mantenar”), posible (“possible”), etc. (139)
The vessel of an airplane functions like a schrodinger’s cat experiment as well, where his
writing is and isn’t occurring at the same time: “Waiting releases writing; most of this book is
(not) happening somewhere in an airport or transit vehicle; as you’re reading, I might be above
the continent, reviewing this sentence and wondering how you curved the light into your pupil so
gracefully;” (95) This space of transition and uncertainty is the one place he can’t perform
rituals, so instead he is forced to plan them, to write them down and share them. Without the
limits of the airplane/ airport/ tarmac, the speaker would not have been able to write these rituals
down. His writing would have failed entirely. He would have dug dzonots in silence for the rest
of his life.
The dzonots are the source of the spiritual magic of the book, yet they are stories,
retellings, parts of the notebooks and compositions. While the airplane/airport is the actual
setting of this book. It makes me think about writing in between bouts of sleep, with a painful
neck, and cramped legs. Dreaming often in the naps. Fragmentation. “Lightheaded sleep brings
you to a series of awakenings. In 21 minutes, we will encounter/discover/create the earth.” (155)
Finally, on the last page, he invites the disgruntled spirit from that transitory space into firm
ground: “keep waking up with me, practicing dreaming, somnambulist” (156) and this way the
writing is allowed to fail; in fact it is what makes it special for him, the schrodinger’s cat, the
ability to write and not write, ritualize and not, at the same time.
March 27, 2018
Beautifully designed, a book of searching. The poems transport you to a “nowhere space,” the experience of which is valuable and affirming. However, the book didn’t seem to carry as much weight as it had space for.
April 4, 2019
For every brilliant insight into mourning, the difficulties of doubling one's experience in the form of writing, and embodied experience this text generates, it offers 2 to 3 expressions that strain for visionary status. Then again, how do you critique a book whose stated goal is to fail as literature? Ultimately, BLACK LAVENDER MILK probably has to be interpreted and evaluated in terms of its performance, not its readability per se.
March 30, 2016
The book takes you thru the authors journey of pain, loss, confusion, person growth and an amazing descriptive path toward a greater enlightenment of knowledge. Never had I read a book of this personal depth and magnitude. This was a different experience for me, both in the reading genre and in being taken to and from different perspectives. Looking forward to more work from this author.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews