Joanna Valente
Poetry
35 pages
Digital PDF
ISBN # 978–1–939675–36–1
First Edition
Agape Editions
Los Angeles, California, United States
Available HERE
Free
In her latest chapbook, Xenos, Joanna Valente offers readers a lyrical narrative that explores the heavy weight of history through the eyes of a foreigner. The stories told within these poems are of the humor of life, the expectancy of death and what we do until then. Valente uses the lens of immigration, its reasoning and consequences paralleled, as a focal point for the collection. These poems are the prospective of the immigrant, the stranger in a strange land, making a new home while carrying the old one with you.
Throughout the collection, you can hear the narrator’s soothing voice, whispering secrets, shortly followed with cold reminders. Her experiences of love, family, and loss are universal, yet distinctly set apart. Her journey was not like all journeys, but her life means what all lives mean.
… Who runs to a war?
Well, it was supposed to be exciting,
It was supposed to be romantic. I guess it
was.[…]
We never wondered what the point
of it all was. It’s only air that drives
the lungs. Makes us human.(from “When I Was a Koutoulako,” p 8-10)
Valente is clever in laying bare the narrator’s humanity. In doing so she creates a voice that compels both affection and intrigue from readers. In “Rigor Mortis” she states:
When I was very young,
I collected beetles. That stopped
once we moved from Maine.
In Brooklyn, I discovered men.
There, my room was famous
for its butterflies.(p 12).
Her speaker’s foreignness is always present, yet the poems do the work of softening the otherness persona, reminding the reader there’s nothing to fear in our differences.
Later, the narrator harnesses our affection and transforms it into concern. In “I Live in a House,” Valente uses the images of a haunted home to illustrate the burden of love for what has been lost. There is a promise of rescue by an identified man, but the narrator remains unconvinced, stating:
& maybe I’d believe
if I was born
a believer(p 21).
Valente has made Xenos available for free download. I encourage you to partake of this gift.
