Other Fugitives & Other Strangers

by Rigoberto González

Other Fugitives & Other Strangers Poems by Rigoberto González
Tupelo Press
Review by Miguel Murphy for Rain Taxi

In his latest book, Other Fugitives and Other Strangers, Rigoberto González explores the horrific side of sexual encounter, the terror of losing self, body, boundary, and identity amidst the taboo practices that involve brutality as pleasure. For González, the idea of romantic love is challenged by the limits of bodily ruin. These poems consider the vulgar animalism of our most human affections. At their best, they bare themselves so perfectly you'll flinch.

In the opening poem, "Good Boy," González sets the psychosexual tone for the book with a regressive portrait of the speaker, asking, "How do you explain this / strange ability to inflict pain?" The child is immediately drowned by the sexual hungers of adulthood he'll later witness:

        Lover, when I drive the nails to your chest
    your mouth opens, white
    and pasty like a moon. Do you
    see me waving back twenty years ago
    from the dlstant planets of my eyes?

Freud's work on childhood development first illustrated how sexual identity takes shape as we discover the limits of the body. Here, González's work examines the effects of sexual experience on adult identity in which "the grief of separation is always brief." It is no accident that the grandfather who appears in the first section's "Of Despots and Deities" ("Abuelo / taught me to spit with blood and to curse with the deep voice / I'd later seek from other men") mirrors the older lover of the final section's "Breaking Down Picasso's Minotaur":

    How can I still sleep
    with you, you ask, when you are

    older than my father
    and I'm young enough to be
    your son?

With a heightened self-awareness, González intimately addresses the many undressed "strangers" and "fugitives" of his book as male lovers, alternating torment and tenderness: grandfather, crisis counselor, transvestite, politician, suicide, rapist, and widower. As he contemplates the joys of transgressive sexuality—"I'm living skin," he writes in "Body, AntiBody," "that craves the skinnish scars / of passion"—the boundaries of the flesh that is self are constantly crossed and re-written as he becomes himself a wounding lover. The body must be tested, worn, abused, pierced, severed, exchanged, and manipulated "like Picasso's / canvas" as the reader is instructed to

    tear elbow from
    rib, split buttocks, dig deep

    into the root of armpits,
    anus, throat—

    thrust them inside
     out.

The fattening eros of lines like "the purple cross / of his foot was just another form of brutal love" is weighed against the brutal clarity of admission: "I suspect / you slip your finger in me while I sleep, / expecting me to suck the menace out." The romance of unreciprocated affection ("Tomorrow he'll forget // to take my kisses with him / and I'll eat them / like a cup of figs") is contrasted against the illicitness of explicit use: "My lover feeds and fattens. . . this keen scavenger / finds value in that vacancy and stuffs it / with himself—cock, finger, foot."

Other Fugitives and Other Strangers is thus a book of poems that dares to exist in the worry between erotic violence and sexual vulgarity. The challenge for González, as for others who attempt explicit poems of psychosexual violence (e.g. Ai, Frank Bidart, Evelyn Lau), is that the poem must be more than provocative. Because its nature is to shock us, this kind of poem can easily be discredited as either pornographic or self-indulgent. Lyricism can save the vulgar from crudity, though these poems risk losing their erotic quality as they force the reader to witness the blunt terrors of touch. The achievement of González's work is that it wavers between this kind of witness and the more accessible wounds of romance.