Basic Needs

by Vanessa Jimenez Gabb

“I will receive money once,” begins Vanessa Jimenez Gabb’s Basic Needs, a candid, sensitive inquiry into “love in the time of capitalism.” Following from Gabb's debut collection, Images of Radical Politics, Basic Needs traces the alienations, catches, and contradictions of current life and work: No cogito ergo sum but “I am because I am having," and no direct actions but constant shivering consequences, “all of the little fires / freezing revolutions.” Nevertheless, Gabb asserts, “to love / has not been more difficult // than deciding to.” With formal fluctuation and complicated hope, the three movements of Basic Needs engage labor, love, and the lives we are able to create: “We have / our passions / and don’t / know how / it will end," though it "cannot exist like this forever."

Praise for BASIC NEEDS:

Anyone who has ever wondered what a Marxist love poem might look like need look no further than Vanessa Jimenez Gabb’s Basic Needs. With its focus on living—how it is done, in a country where workers have had to die for an eight-hour work day & in a world where “love is indeed a stranger to most people,” this stunning collection of poems manages to get at what is most necessary when trying, not just to survive, but find love that might one day lead to life outside of “this system.” & that love is unabashedly anti-capitalist, which makes me especially thankful for the “wayward light / in the poems” here.
—Wendy Trevino

Powerful, elegant, lush, disorienting, philosophical, honest and cutting, full of life, clarity, energy, vulnerability and beauty. These are some of the terms that come to mind when I think of Vanessa Jimenez Gabb’s vibrant new book. Here is a poetics of labor, history, brokenness, money, solidarity, ecology. Here is a book that thinks and loves deeply in order to survive the infinite collapse of the system.
—Daniel Borzutzky

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

Published October 26, 2021

Reviews

[Adrian Neibauer · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, he discusses the differing roles language has in both prose and poetry. In journalistic prose (e.g.: newspapers, blogs) language is used to tell the reader something important. We “ultimately always care about using language to do something.” In poetry, language has a stronger connection to the writer (and ultimately the reader). Poets simultaneously use language to say what they want to say while following its infinite possibilities. Poetic language is inherently moral and writing poetry is an inherently moral act.

Basic Needs by Vanessa Jimenez Gabb is a powerful collection of poems that both say something important and explore the magic of language. Organized in three sections, each individual poem operates as part of the larger poetic narrative. Beginning in La slowteria, a Brooklyn Mexican restaurant, Gabb immediately introduces the reader to her family story: “My life has always been not quite the / same.” We follow her on a journey to the present, meandering through distinctive line breaks, word associations, and beautiful phrases. In one poem, Gabb guides us in an associative movement of single-word lines. As the eye follows each word down the page, there is an unexpected connectedness from one word to the next. One imagines sitting in the crowded La slowteria on a Friday night overhearing adjacent conversations that are all somehow connected in a larger narrative and feeling “Total love / With mystery / And without / Knowing nothing more than the present.

Midway through this first section, we are reminded that this narrative is taking place in America, a country that has exploited workers from its inception. Whether it is the Knights of Labor and the workers’ movements of the late 1800s or Chavez’s United Farm Workers Union working to improve pay and working conditions for farm laborers in the 1960s and 1970s, Gabb cuts to the center of these poems: a noticing of the inequity that privilege has blinded the majority of America’s white citizens. This first section of Basic Needs is not about helping the reader become woke, but holding our gaze (and ear) as we listen to Gabb state out loud that “We have / Our passions” even if we “don’t / Know how / It will end.” I couldn’t stop reading and listening.

Love needs no protection; it is its own protection. This statement opens the middle section titled "Roses." If love is “indeed a stranger to most people,” we are reintroduced to a love that strips off old grievances and allows us to “be closer to the life of me.” It may be a trite simile, but like a bouquet of roses, each poem in this section is both ephemeral and permanent. Upon my first reading, I was sucked into Gabb’s emotive poetics. A second reading allowed me to mediate and allow her love of writing to affect me. My favorite section is an intimate scene in Kyiv: but look at all you’ve been / just you / just you / or as he said / you be me / I be you / that’s love. Gabb is vulnerable and authentic throughout Basic Needs, but especially in this section.

In the final section, "You and me, forever" Gabb circles the reader back to our capitalist present, and there is nowhere to hide.

new products appear
I’ve forgotten
I bought them
and worry
about life and debt
this slip dress might never fit again
the strike catches fire
across the landscape
no longer appropriate to be rigorous
in hiding

Luckily, there is a “wayward light / in the poems” that leads us through this collection. We end back where we started, watching a couple sitting at a table. I can feel how important these poems are to Gabb. When she says, “I will live / In your country / I haven’t always / In my country / We can’t always / Be so kind / The real question is not / Will we hurt / But what do I do / If this is happiness, I feel an urge to start from the beginning and reread. Basic Needs is full of energy and history and love. I loved these poems and I believe that you will love them too.

I highly recommend Basic Needs by Vanessa Jimenez Gabb

[Wendy Trevino · Rating 5 out of 5]

My blurb for this lovely collection of poems:

Anyone who has ever wondered what a Marxist love poem might look like need look no further than Vanessa Jiminez Gabb’s Basic Needs. With its focus on living—how it is done, in a country where workers have had to die for an eight-hour work day & in a world where “love is indeed a stranger to most people,” this stunning collection of poems manages to get at what is most necessary when trying, not just to survive, but find love that might one day lead to life outside of “this system.” & that love is unabashedly anti-capitalist, which makes me especially thankful for the “wayward light / in the poems” here.

[Aumaine Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moments of stunning simplicity and clarity in fragment, even in flattened affect. Sometimes feels unfinished or patched together in a way that leaves me wanting more but also in a way not unrelated to the project of the book

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a tremendous book! Full with life and curiosity.