The Margarita Poems by Luz María Umpierre

Luz María Umpierre’s  The Margarita Poems have, in effect, three central characters. The first of course is Margarita, who is constructed throughout the poem set as the object of sexual desire and also of an obsessive, self-defining love. Almost every poem contains a reference to the speaker’s devotion to Margarita: “Todo por Margarita/ Siempre por Margarita” the speaker writes in “Transcendence,” and in Immanence she describes her “pure desire and lust/ for… my yellow margarita.” The second is Julia, a wild unrestrained lesbian woman, and the third character is the poem’s speaker herself, who moves continuously between Margarita and Julia: at times she is Margarita, at other times Julia, at times she seeks Julia and always she is in love with Margarita. The underlying momentum of the poem set is of Julia moving toward Margarita, yearning for her, and in some moments becoming her, perhaps best exemplified by the following lines in “Immanence”: “I am Julia, / I have crossed the river / MAD, / I have come forth, / new lady lazarus / to unfold my margarita.”

The Margarita Poems are not only a volume of poetry: they are the medium through which Luz María Umpierre-Herrera declared her lesbianism to the world. In her introduction to the Poems, Umpierre explains the urgency of her need to speak “‘lo que nunca pasó por mis labios,’ that which I had not uttered…the fact that I am, among many other things, a Lesbian.” That Umpierre sat down in 1986 to write of her own lesbianism and womanhood through a symbolic object representative of all women is fitting, as we look back now on history and see the late eighties and early nineties as the era when the world, in a sense, came out. As the queer liberation movement was born, Umpierre brought her own queerness to the forefront of her work.  As Umpierre moves toward coming out and toward a public declaration of her lesbian self, so the speaker moves toward Margarita.

Part of the stilted, halted nature I experienced I attribute to my own lack of fluency in Spanish; I had to look up words often enough to interrupt the flow of figurative language. This disclaimer only stretches so far, however, because on the whole I found the Spanish-language poems to be far more lyrically powerful than those in  English. True, a few of the English poems, such as “Only The Hand That Stirs Knows What’s In The Pot” and “No Hatchet Job” were captivating in their consistent recurring imagery and subtly layered feminist affirmations of self. But “The Statue” was either unimpressive or over my head, while the opening poem “Immanence” was thematically rich but lyrically lackluster.

“Immanence” is not pretty. It has a passable sense of concept flow, but few of the images recur, motifs fail to resonate with one another, sonic devices are largely absent, and much of the sexual imagery is so blunt and graphic as to be entirely unsexy. “Lesbian woman,” Umpierre writes, “who’ll masturbate and rule / over my body, Earth, / parting the waters / of my cliterol Queendom.” This plain way of speaking, however, can be seen as a deliberate tactic of communicating truth. The speaker of “Immanence” is in the process of discovering and becoming Julia, a character set up throughout the poem set as representative of the speaker’s own wildness and socially defiant sexual desire. The speaker describes “shedding her clothes” and forgetting her name in the process of bringing forth “my Julia.” It makes sense, then, that the scattered images and allusions of “Immanence” appear to lack cohesion: it is a poem about madness. It is a reclamation of madness. Moreover, after a lifetime of watching lesbian sexuality be objectified through every available form of media, there is something refreshing about reading a description of it that is so blatantly unsexy. The speaker is calling forth her own wild, sexual self— “I touch my petals: / ‘I love me, / I love me not, / I love me,’”— but the reader is not necessarily invited to revel in it with her; only to bear witness.

I would recommend the Margarita Poems, but conditionally. If you are invested primarily in pretty turns of phrase, if you want poetry that is accessible, easily understandable, and consistently beautiful to hear, Umpierre’s coming-out volume is not meant for you. But if you are looking to root yourself in the history of queer Latina women writers, or if you are looking to find and explore your own lesbian self, the Margarita Poems are well worth your time.