Now in Color

by Jacqueline Balderrama

Through the poetics of witness, ekphrasis, portraiture, and family mythos, this book deepens our understanding of hybrid identities and calls attention to those impacted by tensions along the U.S.-Mexico border. Now in Color explores the multigenerational immigrant experience of Mexican-Americans who have escaped violence, faced pressures to assimilate, and now seek to reconnect to a fragmented past. These poems illuminate the fluidity of language and of perception through both small hypocrisies and real atrocities. One of Balderrama's strategies is to use the development of motion pictures and Technicolor as a lens through which to examine personal and cultural histories and stereotypes. She also considers bilingual expectations through an innovative series of Spanish definition poems. Balderrama documents pieces of her family's oral tradition and draws connections to ongoing injustices experienced by current migrant families, offering a living picture of a present inevitably tied to and colored by its past. Through the poetics of witness, ekphrasis, portraiture, and family mythos, Now in Color deepens our understanding of hybrid identities and calls attention to those impacted by tensions along the U.S.-Mexico border. "For Jacqueline Balderrama, identity is an 'accounted nothingness.' It is an unrecovered reel of the two sides of Rita one, a long-name Hispanic, the other, a silver-screen ether. It is a Mobius double-sided ribbon of family remembrances, borderland maps, suffering treks across the blistering earth, and a text to 'collect what is scattered.' Enter Picasso's circus scenes, Kahlo's ripped chest dangling, Varo's multi-dimensional floating woman, Monet's crumbling fertile bridge, da Vinci's moon ocean. This is the real-to-unreal figure, the lost movie, the outsider's invitation to escape together into her Technicolor vortex of fractured meditations and, most of all, her art of becoming. NOW IN COLOR is wild and radical in form, iridescent in blood and genre."--Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States "In NOW IN COLOR, things are rarely as they a legislative apology, say, or the 1914 film The Life of General Villa , which spliced together re-enacted and actual footage of the Mexican Revolution, or starlet Rita Hayworth preserving only part of her given name, Margarita Carmen Cansino. Balderrama's imagination lingers between what we think we know and a lush vision of what we may have lost. That savvy, stratified attention also drives two series--Spanish words defined via rich personal image, and twenty Picasso paintings that prompt another man's ardent self-reflections. Always, this poet sees the 'names which are not names,' showing us what else language can contain--and release."--Sally Ball, author of Hold Sway "'One fellow asks, What are you? / He means why are you brown.' These poems are a heartfelt, artful wrestling with self, representation, place, allegiance, food, and so much more as the smallest of details grow into art, love, sacrifice, and family. The poems work to understand living itself as a gift, reaching for its celebrations and triumphs, even, and especially, where they don't always at first seem evident. Though often quiet--a side of things we don't easily pay attention to--these poems are pure 21st century grappling with ethnic identity as it moves into everyday life."--Alberto Ríos, Arizona's Inaugural Poet Laureate Poetry. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies.

100 pages, Paperback

Published September 15, 2020

Reviews

[Kamali Williams]

great book! another book i read for my internship ! there was specific section where a selection of poems were inspired by picasso pieces and that was i think the best part

[Ruth A.M]

Now in Color is a collection that “collects what’s scattered” and colors the past. Balderrama’s fierce poetry illuminates the shadowed stories of multigenerational immigration, oral tradition, hybrid identity, border control, and cultural stereotypes. This collection juxtaposes many immigrant stories with personal experiences, and in poems like “The Dead Dream Us,” Balderrama explores her own immigration story and her legacy. Balderrama’s Spanish definition poems expand the borders of Latinx and bilingual writing. These poems go beyond the singular poem through an innovative form to portray the fluidity of language, its perception, and its technicolor qualities.

[Ceridwen Hall]

A beautiful interweaving of family history, film history, and nature!