UNDER CAPITALISM IF YOUR HEAD ACHES THEY JUST YANK OFF YOUR HEAD by Ariel Francisco
In Under Capitalism If Your Head Aches They Just Yank Off Your Head, Ariel Francisco reaches into family history, Latin American history, and US history in order to disrupt one’s typical understanding of what American poetry can do. From the Bronx to the Dominican Republic to Guatemala, the poems in this collection trace and retrace origins, lineages, and the missteps and fractures that complicate what it means to be a first generation Latinx-American in a country so dedicated to silencing, violence, and erasing the past.
Ariel Francisco lives in the land of poetry. Here, everything in the world is a character for a poem—sparrows eating a slice of pizza, construction workers, laundromats, the sun, the moon— all participate in these poems. They quip and laugh and shake their heads. I love these poems for their bitter humor, their palpable outrage, their father-son love. Most of all, I love getting to ride shotgun with Francisco through the surrealer than real world he writes.
—José Olivarez, author of Citizen Illegal
There is in Ariel Francisco’s extraordinary new collection a long absent and much needed voice of alert wisdom. It is a voice belonging to an old soul who has labored in the vineyards and layers of poetry. This work never feels labored but fully human in its bitter-sweetness and clarity about the steep odds of our condition. In loving detail, Francisco shifts through the dross and detail of our daily life to reveal and touch the texture of older truths we try our best to forget.
—Ammiel Alcalay, co-editor of A Dove in Flight: Poems by Faraj Bayrakdar
Ariel Francisco’s third collection of poems is a tribute to his Dominican and Guatemalan antepasados; the poet blurs and overlays his life with the lives of his father, grandfather, mother, grandmother, tios—we look to the faces of our elders to search for ourselves. In Under Capitalism if Your Head Aches They Just Yank Off Your Head he honors their presences, feels their absences in poems mirrored in Spanish and English and includes translations of poems by his father. In an honest and tender tone, the author draws his father out in spirit: “I want to tell him I am listening.” The poems evoke a Sunday feeling, and in an earnest and searching voice, Francisco engages us with wry titles and a human, relatable humor, an economy of language that is faceted with a haiku-clarity. Set in New York and ranging the Bronx, East River, Harlem, and Brooklyn these poems harness the tradition of Whitman, Lorca, Komunyakaa, James Wright, and Roque Dalton. Francisco’s work is an anthem of what it means to be an immigrant in a city, to be untethered, and found in the pauses, in the quiddity of a bar, a café, laundromat, on the subway—a bone-tired search for what fills us, what wonder we can afford in this life, what is left in letters, birth certificates, citizenship applications, and poems—and all that is intangible, and yet somehow “still here.” Francisco’s poems atone and restore; he invites us to gather, he brings us in. Leaning close, he shows us how to carry those memories: “to call back each / tune in its own way, its little / broken reflection carrying in / the wind, and it’s almost too / beautiful to bear but I bear it.”
—Alexandra Lytton Regalado, author of Matria and Relinquenda