Odalisque in Pieces

by Carmen Gimenez Smith

In her debut poetry collection, Carmen Giménez Smith illuminates Latina identity in the prismatic light of postcolonial history, feminism, myth, and the fragmentation of modernity. From these disparate elements she fashions a female persona—“clairvoyant with great shoes”—who is both bracingly modern and movingly vulnerable. Through her poems we traverse the landscape of a woman’s life (girl, mother, lover), navigating a terrain tinted with mythology and relic yet still fresh and uncharted. The poems revolve around issues of identity—and the ways in which identity is both inherited and constructed/reconstructed. Or, as one poem puts it, “The planet floating backwards / whirling some of us older than the stars, some of us nascent and bare.” Although she employs techniques of avant-garde poetry, Giménez Smith shades and deepens the New World landscape into a territory of rare lyric intensity and energy. Humorous, sly, sexy, sophisticated, these poems are animated by passion and hard-won knowledge.

In these poems we encounter such strange beauties as a girl assembling and disassembling, a moth trapped in a glass of water, new-age fairy godmothers, and a lark who sings for the milkman. Yet we are also made aware of how these beauties reflect the speaker’s troubles—her effort to employ, in the words of one of her most memorable poems, “Only the invisible post where she writes the encounters / with air’s lusters. Only the imagined hour / with which she’s made a fragile craft.”

Vivid and charged with an inner light, these are poems that linger and expand in the mind and memory.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2009

About the author

Formerly a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa, Carmen Gimenez Smith is now an assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University, the publisher of Noemi Press, and the editor-in-chief of PUERTO DEL SOL. Her work has most recently appeared in MANDORLA, COLORADO REVIEW and PLOUGHSHARES and is forthcoming in jubilat and DENVER QUARTERLY. She is the author of ODALISQUE IN PIECES (University of Arizona Press, 2009) and BRING DOWN THE LITTLE BIRDS (University of Arizona, 2010). She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico with her husband and their two children.

Reviews

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

'I'll find it. My kind always does.'

Carmen Giménez Smith is a poet new to this reader ...until now...until ODALISQUE IN PIECES leaped off the pages and burrowed into the psyche, unveiling with even the 8th veil the woman who has become all women. She seems to cherish playing with words, words that at times seems disparate and even haphazard until you realize she is playing with your mind, painting surreal images that poppingly become real. In this first major collection she takes us through the hormonally charged paths that lead from childhood to lover to mother/wife and pauses at each interval transformation to seduce us with the feelings and responses that so particularly belong to each phase of being so alive.

But she also can share microcosms of feelings in a few words. In 'Pillow Talk' she writes:

I am odalisque in pieces,
Frisson should happen every single time,

but is doesn't. Instead it stammers
like a bike light.

You promise postcards
from the Atlantic Mirror,

then leave scarabs under
your thumbprint.

My gypsy window:
your fissure.

Listen, I got here
the same way you did,

taking heart in a stranger
who plucked music from my pudendum,

so make me something true
before you go. Or don't.

I'll find it.
My kind always does.

Welcome to the graceful and sensual word of Carmen Giménez Smith. She is a poet here to stay.

Grady Harp

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the lyricism in these poems, the relentless image.

Here I bend her like a reed and whistle.

When my mother kisses me
She tastes like soot.

His, the face with twenty sides.

I wish for my bloody caul back.

But the jar in every woman's heart makes her a nun.

You talked like there was an Italy we'd go to together.

The balcony is a floor without walls.

[Elizabeth Theriot · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous collection about women, creation, love, pain, myth...the realities we create and the nature of memory. The language is often direct and frank, other times fantastical and imbued with whimsy. Sometimes these poems are funny and sometimes they hurt. A vivid, relatable work.

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those first books that took time and care in the making and it shows. Worth the wait, winnowed, honed and close to perfection.

[hali]

finished this a while ago but forgot to mark it because i am an idiot who doesn't know how to use goodreads~~~~


carmen did it again! fuck me up cgs!!!!!!!! is carmen giménez smith quickly becoming one of my favorite poets? yup! should she be y'alls? probably! is anyone reading these? hard no!

noteworthy poems:
why i left
translation
the drive home (this one fucked me up!!! as a mother with a young child omg carmen wtf) ("my son is my newest nerve/too small to speak, mouthpiece for death.")

carmen writes about motherhood, marriage, generational trauma, domesticity, heartbreak, and like the disillusionment that often accompanies things that are typically thought of as good/ideal, but again! she looks at those pesky contradictions between the dichotomies of mother and artist or mother and lover or mother and wife or mother and woman who is more than mother and wife but somehow reduced but also HOW DO U HANDLE THIS REDUCTION WHEN ITS ALSO kIND OF WHAT U WANT ?!

i have more to say but my keyboard pounding is waking up the toddler and scaring the cat

c ya

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

a good collection, with some subtle power.