Barbara Brinson Curiel
Barbara Brinson Curiel is a native of San Francisco, California. She has recently published poems in the journals: Kweli,Huizsache, and, as well as in the chapbook anthology Mirage. Her poems are included in the 2011 collection Cantar de Espejos: Poesía Testimonial Chicana por Mujeres published in Mexico, and in anthologies including: Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature From California; The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-five Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature; Literatura Chicana 1965-1995; and in the forthcoming Anthology of Latino Poetry.
Barbara's first book of poetry, Speak to Me From Dreams, was published in 1989 (Third Woman Press). She published two chapbooks: Nocturno, and Vocabulary of the Dead, early in her writing career. Her 2010-2012 fellowship with Canto Mundo, the national organization for Latino poets, has fostered a renewed period of writing and publishing after a hiatus devoted to family and career.
A graduate of Mills College, Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Barbara is a professor in the departments of Critical Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English at Humboldt State University, where she teaches creative writing, Chicano/Latino and feminist studies, and American literature. She has published scholarly essays on the narrative writings of Latina authors. Barbara is also a textile artist.
MEXICAN JENNY
BY BARBARA BRINSON CURIEL
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Levine Prize in Poetry 2012
Barbara Curiel's poetry submerges us in the interior landscapes of the everyday and the mythic: the empty vessels of pots and cans blessed in a family kitchen, the wolf-blood-stained apron of Red Riding Hood's grandmother, a quilt stitched in a jail cell by a woman "mining gold / from the dirt of my life." At the heart of this collection which offers up an "Ars Domestica" of a poet's life is "Mexican Jenny," Curiel's imaginative re-telling of the story of Jenny Wenner, a prostitute convicted of killing her abusive husband in Cripple Creek, Colorado in 1913. This structure serves to remind us all how at the center of every "Mexican" woman's life are the undocumented lives of "ragged men buried daily in the mines / and women whose every mouthful depended / on what was brought to the surface." Here is an illuminating work that unearths and pays lyrical tribute to the labor of brown women across borders and other divides. -- Deborah Paredez (author of This Side of Skin and co-founder of CantoMundo)
Master poet Barbara Brinson Curiel wields all the stunning power and raw honesty for which she is best known. This collection is both delightful and unsettling, ranging from fables for a modern world to the hard-hitting title poem, "Mexican Jenny," to the incomparable and captivating slice of culture in poems like "Recipe: Hinterland Tamales," with a spicy sprinkling of humor throughout. The language is direct -- bare and beautiful. In "Immigrant Partoum," Brinson-Curiel both follows religiously and simultaneously shatters and alters the form of a pantoum, as immigrants' lives follow, reflect, shatter, and alter the form of a native community. A delicious dessert of poetry for the modern world -- and as full of surprises as it is of truth. Bravo to Brinson-Curiel's brave new world of poetry! -- Carmen Tafolla, Ph.D. (Poet Laureate, City of San Antonio)
Curiel's debut book of poetry, Speak to Me from Dreams (1989), prompted acclaimed poet Lucille Clifton to remark that "Curiel speaks to us from the richness of two languages but in one magical voice." This second book, a quarter-century in the making, marks Curiel's return to verse and affirms Clifton's early observation... A superb second book that hopefully signals more books to come from this smart and talented poet. -- Diego Báez, Booklist
Mexican Jenny
1.
Girls like me
come from alleys
from dirt floors
from cold kitchens
from one thin blanket.
Girls like me
come from fists
from passing strangers
from wandering fathers
from mothers with one heel
hooked on the bar stool.
Girls like me
come from drought
from war.
2.
When I was a child in Acapulco
I worked for a rich family
sweeping their kitchen
washing their dishes.
One day, after a few nips, the cook,
who was my mother's friend,
had said, Come, work for me
in the big house.
I stood on a wooden box
washed dishes stamped with indigo
trees and flowers, with birds
like none I'd seen.
I stood elbow
deep in dirty water, dreamed
of far places without greasy pans
nor the boss's wandering hands.
3.
The boss's wife had a red
silk shawl embroidered
with many-colored swallows.
She draped it like a flag on the back of her chair.
It had come on a ship from Manila,
from that land of ship builders and sailors,
of travelers who, years before, brought
Chinese porcelain and silk to Acapulco.
Every time I walked by
I fingered its edges
and felt like I was dipping my fingers
into the tide.
After I'd found the fault lines
in one cup too many,
when I'd daydreamed one
dish too many to pieces,
the cook ran me off,
but not before I'd pinched that shawl,
wrapped it around my waist
under my dirty skirt.
Running home
the silk rubbed
my legs,
a river current.