by Samantha Leon
Richard Blanco’s Homeland of My Body is a Call Back to Our Humanity
Reflection gives way to reinvention in Blanco’s nearly two-hundred-page volume of new and collected poems. Ever-generous, Blanco gives the reader broad access to his best works with over one hundred pieces that call back to the poet’s origins and explore his common themes of home, self, connectedness, culture, and patriotism in fresh ways, too. The collection comes at a pivotal point in both Blanco’s career and in the history of the nation he calls home— one in which he’s been vocally compared to a modern-day Whitman and is writing as post-National Humanities Medal recipient in a country fast-approaching a presidential election.
Bookended with new work, Homeland of My Body has a center that showcases The Original Blanco—the one who summons a remarkable depth of personal and collective identity through musings about food, photos, and family. Take the favorite Spanglish poem, “Mango, Number 61” from City of a Hundred Fires and the reader is reminded of two of Blanco’s best skills—narrative storytelling and image-making:
Mango was Mrs. Pike, the last americana on the block with the best mango tree in the neighborhood. Mama would coerce here into granting us picking rights—after all, los americanos don’t eat mango, she’d reason…Mangos watching like amber cat’s eyes. Mangos, perfectly still in their speckled maroon shells like giant unhatched eggs.
In a nation obsessed with manipulated images, the celebration of things exactly as they are—down to their most dazzling essence—is refreshing. Blanco does this better than ever in his new works with a front-loaded directness that a seasoned poet can feel confident in employing. Though, in his early works he doesn’t shy away from powerful declarations, either. Take the ending of the title poem of his early collection, Looking for the Gulf Motel:
I am thirty-eight, driving up Collier Boulevard, looking for The Gulf Motel, for everything that should still be, but isn’t. I want to blame the condos, their shadows, for ruining the beach, and my past, I want to chase the snowbirds away with their tacky mansions and yachts, I want to turn the golf courses back into mangroves. I want to find The Gulf Motel exactly as it was and pretend for a moment, nothing is lost.
Age itself can be misconstrued as a sort of loss. But Blanco shows that one can not only maintain the fervor of youth but gain qualities that a less mature poet often dreams of acquiring. It’s here where the Whitman-esque comparisons begin to make sense. In his newer works, Blanco writes with a newfound freedom, and at the same time, a newfound urgency that is certainly timely. Take the piece, “Why I Needed To,” which is brave in its unfinished formatting, chosen line breaks, and the expansiveness of its examinations:
…because my husband, who’s still scared of his adoration for me as we embrace sleep, still doubts / how long I’ll nest my dreams in his arms…because I have / never quite told him: always…because I’m just as afraid of needing him more than I need myself…because I’m not the one / I’ve curated on Instagram: oh so humbled by, so grateful for… / so many posted blessings with my posed selves…because / tonight I again remember I’m nothing more than a mirage / slowly disappearing on my porch, sitting with half the life / I have left, still trying to piece how I fit into the puzzle of the constellations…
As the poet contemplates the reality of his human experience, we’re reminded that we are all subject to the same type of questions. Less airy and bolder are the pages that close the collection. Near the end, here are punchy, commanding poems that recall rich pop culture references and have a clear agenda, such as “Let’s Remake America Great Again,” from his recent collection How to Love a Country, which rests on biting sarcasm to “…recast every woman as a housewife…” in the image of Samantha from Bewitched, and “Seventeen Funerals” which name the lives lost to school gun violence.
Another batch of new (not previously published) poems that make up this first “new & collected” work for Blanco sit after the selections from How to Love a Country. In these poems, Blanco writes in his characteristic long prose style, still making smart cultural commentary, but with a bit more care toward the individual. It’s here where he manages to do something quite worthy of the Whitman comparisons, in that his musings about himself, the individual, invite a sort of self-reflection that isn’t selfish at all, but rather draws one into their own body and beckons for a state of present consciousness. After all that makes us unique as individuals, isn’t it our singular bodies and their attributes that make us common to one another as a species? Our hands. Our eyes. Our mortality—all shared. Blanco achieves this affect most obviously in the title poem of the book, “For the Homeland of my Body,” in which he writes of his own:
For my hands:
still these hands, sculpting sandcastles, guarded
by the seagulls and palm trees that raised me
to reach for the sun, to be as confident
as Miami’s skyscrapers rising as I did.
For my feet:
still these feet wandering forever through
my father’s sugarcane fields, tousled by
the wind of his dead voice blowing with
stories of the sweet-sour life his machete
earned for him, for me.
Once more juxtaposing the personal with the political, Blanco references the very real chaos of the pandemic in “Say This Isn’t the End” while engaging the fictional masks that we shed as a population during the ordeal:
Say we live on, say we’ll forget the masks
that kept us from dying from, the invisible,
but say we won’t ever forget the invisible
masks we realized we had been wearing
most our lives, disguising ourselves from
each other. Say we won’t veil ourselves again…
…Say I’ll get more chances to say more than
thanks Shirley at the checkout line, praise
her turquoise jewelry, her son in photos
taped to her register, dare to ask about
her throat cancer. Say this isn’t her end.
This poem closes the collection, and its agenda is clear, giving the reader an ability to peer into the poet’s core message of unity via shared experiences and our human condition. Here, his signature prose shines as he dips in and out of temporal states—a sort of anthem for his own life history and an ode to a future of (hopefully) more moments among fellow citizens that compel such poetry of careful cherishing. Between the choices to write primarily from the perspective of “we” to the subject matter itself, Blanco accomplishes his goal at the end of this epic volume—reminding us that when we come back to ourselves, we come back to each other.
Homeland of My Body, Richard Blanco
Beacon Press, 10/24/2023
$25.95, available at bookshop.org
Author Samantha Leon is a writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her poems and nonfiction have been published by Rattle, The Academy of American Poets, So to Speak, Islandia Journal, Small Orange Journal, and Tinderbox Poetry, among others. Her debut collection, “Mapping Desire” is forthcoming in 2024 as a chapbook with Poetry Online. Her reviews and interviews can be found in The Iowa Review Online, Tupelo Quarterly, The Colorado Review, Poetry International, and Gulf Stream Magazine.
Gulf Stream Magazine 